


AND WAKING SLEEP

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-30
Updated: 2011-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:06:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke finds Feynriel in dreaming, and Feynriel finds himself somewhere else, and Connor finds Feynriel at last. <i>Feynriel no longer had to fear the night. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	AND WAKING SLEEP

**Author's Note:**

> This is wholly written inspired by and for Naiadestricolor on tumblr, from whom all Connor/Feynriel springs. And from whom these damn magisters come, too. Hopefully I have done their designs no disservice from the inspiration I gleaned just staring at them! Major thanks to MJules/onlytowardschaos on tumblr for the beta!

>   
> _‘Those who have compared our life to a dream were right… We sleeping wake, and waking sleep.’ – Michel de Montaigne_   
> 

Feynriel no longer had to fear the night.

According to some—for example, his master—that fear had never been necessary. Fear advanced caution, and caution was a shield; as anyone with two eyes and half a mind knew, shields could also be used as weapons, not just to defend or to deflect. Caution alone was acceptable, but caution wasn’t the only element of fear, and the limitations or hesitations fear imposed were more like shackles than blades—dead weights, instead of keen weapons.

Feynriel sighed, pushing hair from his eyes. He knew the lecture by heart, just as he knew certain spells, just as he remembered his mother’s chiding voice. Instruction, intimation, and incentive.

They had nothing to do with dreaming.

The oil in the lamps gleamed from the light, perhaps more than the lamps themselves. He enjoyed watching them, set along the windowsills, and the lights just outside—other oil burning in other lamps set in other households, just as burnished and just as bright. Now and then a quiet breeze, blown all the way from Seheron and twice as hot as its jungles, shifted the curtains, and nothing stood between him and anyone else.

But that was just an illusion, more dangerous than a dream. The wind twisted his hair from its braid, something that required constant attendance—something his master encouraged, to find the patterns from the chaos that blew it open regularly.

Sometimes, it was nothing more than annoying. Lessons on a balmy Tevinter night were the worst of all, which was what made them so important to remember. Feynriel leaned against the sill, naming each of the magisters in their villas one by one, from window-light to window-light, and counted fewer friends than he did allies, fewer allies than he did enemies by association.

They all attended the same dinner parties, and shared the same couches, and drank the same wine. They crossed the same tiles and laughed at the same jokes, and when they dueled each other the next morning—that happened less often than rumor had it, more often than not, rare in the summer because of laziness and heat—it was expected. Dangerous, but commonplace, just like any mage: free or encircled or apostate.

Feynriel grasped the curtains, just as flimsy as a silken fall of hair. He meant to draw them shut, until he saw the light flickering in an open window across the way and far down the quiet street. A few scant flashes before it darkened—that was the signal, and Feynriel sighed again.

 _Fereldans._ They were always so secretive. They could have sent a courier, or taken a late-night stroll, but instead they cupped their hands around a candle-wick, sending surreptitious messages any clever magister could intercept, if they so cared to do it.

Feynriel bent low over the nearest lamp. The air itself shimmered around it, a spell-wisp of wind to tend and manipulate the light. It dimmed and flared and dimmed again, which meant Feynriel heard or saw or simply understood. It was an answer, which was balm on the burn to anyone who dared ask a hopeful question.

Connor sent messages, and Feynriel answered them. It was an old routine, one that never lost its childish excitement—though it did mean less now, and sometimes Feynriel found himself rolling his eyes at the pretense, despite or because he was also smiling. He blew out the lamp after, and tugged the curtains shut, where they continued to billow inward, but only lazily.

They whispered along the floor like Feynriel’s bare feet, like the sheets against his night-robes, both equally pretty.

Connor thought it was garish, but Connor liked wet mud instead of dry sand; his master was hard as a column instead of sly as the vine wrapped around it.

‘A fine analogy,’ Feynriel’s master said when he heard it. The comparison pleased him, as Feynriel hoped—or suspected—it would.

Feynriel undid the top clasp at his throat; the pressure choked him in the night, and he required a sense of freedom rather than constriction in order to move just as freely. The pillows were soft, the bed softer, the canopy above pale as a cloud.

He wasn’t the vine or the column, but the wind that parted around them, that crept through the cracks, that found entry even through hard stone, the veins in marble or curls in a green tendril.

He closed his eyes.

Connor was waiting for him, just beyond his reach, legs crossed despite the fine tension of his magic.

The Fade itself wasn’t lonely; it was dangerous because it was the opposite of that. A mage was never alone, and that was never more true than in the Fade.

Feynriel reached out from behind, and Connor shuddered when he felt the touch ghosting along his shoulder.

‘Scared?’ Feynriel asked.

‘ _No,_ ’ Connor replied, with an expression muted by the Fade’s own muted colors. _Color_ , Feynriel corrected himself, because it was all one pale thing, a brown that was sometimes yellow and sometimes gray, that dimmed Connor’s eyes and hid shadows with more shadows. ‘But you have to stop _doing_ that.’

‘ _You_ have to start getting used to it,’ Feynriel replied. He didn’t miss Connor’s expression then, expected as it was, a shrug of his shoulders and a roll of his eyes. He stretched his arms above his head, hands against his elbows, but it was all part of the act—something casual he didn’t really feel, sharp and wary as the cant of his mouth.

Fereldans also had trouble with trust. Connor relied on himself; it was all a matter of difficulty, or stubbornness, or pride. He was only as curious as he was confident, only as confident as he was contrary.

And Connor didn’t like the Fade.

He traveled to it because of that, to prove he could conquer what he wanted to avoid. He didn’t take Feynriel’s hand no matter how many times Feynriel offered it, bumping against his side as they slipped through the shadows together, and Feynriel curled his fingers against nothing more substantial than his own palm.

That was probably a lesson, too.

‘So.’ Feynriel perched on the edge of some dead fountain, silent and bare as the grave. ‘How was _your_ day?’

‘Delightful,’ Connor replied. ‘Magnificent. …Boring.’

‘Boring?’ Feynriel asked. In his experience, it was always those stories that were the most worth hearing—more than the delightful ones, or the magnificent.

Connor’s eyes flicked over his face; Feynriel felt the gaze like a midsummer rainstorm in Minrathous, warm little droplets pattering down his forehead and the sharp bridge of his nose. In the Fade, Feynriel’s senses were too often twined around one other—colors could be heard, and scents tasted, and sounds had a touch all their own. It had been strange at first, and took some time to accept, but now it was the waking world that seemed stranger still—dry and flat as a stale alienage biscuit by comparison.

‘Since I’ve already had an ‘incident’ in the Fade, I have to study the theoretical before progressing—have you even _heard_ of the _Spiritorum Etherialis_?’ Connor folded his arms over his chest, his voice adopting a rehearsed tone: the practiced airs of an Imperium magister lecturing from his atrium, half a memory and half pretend and all swagger. ‘ _Only through first understanding can one hope to achieve mastery._ Of course. But I understand plenty—like, don’t make a deal with a bloody desire demon, no matter how attractive she looks, and you’ll do just fine.’

‘I probably could have told you that,’ Feynriel said, humor milder than in waking, muted by their surroundings. He was easily distracted in the Fade, a symptom that even hours of meditation with his master’s swinging censers couldn’t solve.

Dreaming minds stretched like a swath of lace over the muddied landscape before him, each separate, but each comprising its own section of the delicate weave. Feynriel could see them all so clearly, knew exactly what it would take to pluck or unravel a thread for his own purposes, his own magic, and his own desires. Familiar faces shimmered like the iridescent surface of a soap bubble—young apprentices and rival magisters, gossiping and drinking and laughing and sleeping.

But none of them was the face he sought.

The familiarity and the disappointment tickled, same as the soft underfeathers of Feynriel’s apprentice pauldrons. It wasn’t a memory, nor was it a vision from any of his acquaintances in Tevinter, enemies and allies alike safe from the _somniari_ in their midst tonight. It was a memory, drawn over a great distance, at the very farthest reaches of Feynriel’s scope of power.

He imagined himself running his fingers along the ragged edges of a map, its borders pale with age, burnt corners and distant mountain ridges like sharp little teeth across each curve and stretch of sea. Awake, it would take weeks, even months to make the journey—depending on weather, on bandits, on coin and treachery. Feynriel could see the roads in his mind’s eye, the rolling green hills of the Free Marches and Kirkwall in the distance, its empty Gallows still filled with screaming.

In sleep, the Champion of Kirkwall fought the Arishok over again and always, twirling the shadowy line of his staff to fire bolts of wisp-lightning—wisp-lightning to stop the onslaught, wisp-lightning to slow each blow as it came. It was a sight Feynriel knew by heart, better than his own heart, even if he hadn’t been there to see it unfold with his own two eyes.

Hawke dreamed of it often, and the stories had been passed around all the best parties for a long time, a favorite topic amongst the magisters: the parable of the mage and the qunari, or magic and the qun, the hardwood staff against the massive blade.

In Hawke’s dreams, his success was never as impressive.

Feynriel’s temptation to intervene was never strong enough to overpower his training, though sometimes he wondered if the knowledge that Connor was alongside him had more to do with it, embarrassment before protocol. Connor asked questions; Feynriel was confident enough to ignore them, old enough to know how, but they’d still be there, and the point was to predict and waylay rather than to bury.

‘ _Boring_ ,’ Connor reminded him. His voice cut across land and its borders, his fingers giving Feynriel’s collar a tug. They weren’t warm, because everything was cool in the Fade, but they did poke the back of Feynriel’s neck, flesh on flesh through the mists of the arcane.

Feynriel waved them away.

That sort of behavior was all right for boys, but they weren’t boys anymore. Even Connor’s beard looked like something—something more than shadow or an accident, something that might feel like hair if someone were to touch it. If someone ever wanted to.

Connor touched it often enough for that, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger, as though he thought that might do anything but discourage it from growing.

‘You’re eavesdropping,’ Connor said.

‘Shh,’ Feynriel replied.

‘…And _now_ I’m interrupting you.’ Connor rubbed his beard on impulse, a friendless whisper of sound, because he thought it should have a noise. That was all dreams were—expectations, impulse, and longing, a flimsy structure upon which trust was built. Feynriel recognized it as a deep brown color, the same as Connor’s hair in the sunlight, warmer than the Fade and warmer than Feynriel felt. ‘You certainly know how to make someone feel welcome.’

‘We shouldn’t be doing this anyway,’ Feynriel said. It always came, sooner or later—reluctance to share this moment equal only to the desire for company.

The Fade wasn’t lonely, but it didn’t offer the right sort of friendship, either.

‘That’s never stopped you before,’ Connor replied.

Feynriel leaned back against the stone frame of the fountain, just like the one in the center of the agora. It nearly gave, not crumbling but disappearing, before his understanding of it held, and so did his position. Little beasts ran before them, and Connor looked away; Feynriel could still hear the clash of the Arishok’s relentless blade against Hawke’s staff, and taste the shudder of his aching bones.

It was the pain Hawke remembered more than anything else, and though Feynriel was no healer, he was still swayed by the impulse to soothe that pain, to give him sweeter rest.

‘You always get that look,’ Connor said, sounding more distant than usual—or maybe just older. His shoulder bumped Feynriel’s as he turned, not kicking one of the stones beneath his feet—not trusting them to skitter where he aimed—but studying them instead, arms still folded across his chest.

‘If you tell me I remind you of a demon you once knew, you’re not invited again.’ Feynriel tucked his braid back over his shoulder. Hawke was restless; he’d wake soon, and once he opened his eyes, he’d be beyond Feynriel’s aegis.

It was as frustrating as it was enjoyable, what Feynriel’s master called private study. The point was to offer oneself temptation and learn all the ways to deny it, an exercise in refusal. It tested Feynriel’s scope, his reach, the very nature of distance.

It also tested Connor’s patience.

‘Well,’ Connor said, ‘you’re a little bit taller, and a little bit less naked, and a little bit less purple. But you’d look good in all those chains.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Feynriel replied, and finally focused on what was before him, instead of what was on the other side of the Hundred Pillars, what might as well have been a hundred years away.

*

They walked together in circles, getting nowhere as always, and talked about things that didn’t matter but weren’t boring anyway. Feynriel’s master was planning a trip to Marnus Pell and Feynriel was excited, and Connor was sulking, and they kept bumping elbows until Feynriel finally said something about it.

It wasn’t really their elbows, but it was how they walked together during the day. Some things lingered, insinuated themselves, from the outside world into the world of expected dreaming.

‘You are—’ Connor began, but he shook his head, and didn’t finish the sentence.

He was definitely sulking. Connor studied maps as though they were secret passageways, as though the right glance would see him sailing to Vyrantium. He wanted to go to Marnus Pell, and what was more, he wanted to go there first.

‘Jealous?’ Feynriel asked. He opened a door and Connor rolled his eyes.

‘Show-off,’ he replied.

Soon after, they parted, Feynriel with the usual promises that he wouldn’t spy while Connor was sleeping. ‘This is spying enough,’ Connor muttered, glancing over his shoulder, braid messy against his jaw. They hadn’t done much; it made them feel dangerous but it was just a meeting, in a secret place, where Feynriel made sure no one else could find them.

Privacy was currency more powerful than coin—not just in Tevinter, but especially in Tevinter.

Feynriel allowed them to slip away from each other, trying to ease the pressure of his focus, but his own dreams had long since turned to form from nothing. There was no avoiding that—the shapes and the shadows and the silence, all the doors and all the windows.

He woke rested, without the usual shadows under his eyes, and ate a hearty breakfast, honey drizzled on fruit, making his fingers sticky. He sucked his sweet-stained thumb until he remembered there was no purpose in doing something like that, not unless someone else was looking—someone who wanted a show—and so he washed instead in a bowl of water, then dried his hands with a cloth napkin, enjoying the last few moments of peace before preparation.

All days passed with this same method of routine. He had his privacy in the morning, then private lessons, then private study, late-afternoon classes or conference less private; in the evening he attended the parties, though not at the main tables, or furthered his education socially, as though ‘private’ was a concept that never existed at all.

As a child from a distant alienage, without much culture—as a stranger to the Imperium, and never quite one of their own, despite the patchwork of its other denizens—these lessons were just as important. Understanding magic would make him wise; understanding spells would make him clever; understanding people would make him dangerous.

The slaves in the atrium passed by on their way from room to room, their ears so much sharper, full points rather than rounded cartilage hidden beneath a fall of hair. The little braid Feynriel used to wear left nothing to the imagination, and he supposed he must have been more stubborn then, or less subtle.

He pushed his hair back behind his ear. It wasn’t fidgeting, though Connor would have squared off a corner of thin parchment and thrown it at his head for his efforts.

Feynriel smoothed the fronts of his robes instead, and headed into his master’s study: a den with low couches and ancient tomes, the musty smell of vellum and softer paper, with ink so faded Feynriel had a headache just thinking about trying to parse it.

It focused his mind, cleared his head. Working through distraction, pain, difficulty, all obstacles—ankles tucked beneath him, tasseled pillow at the small of his back, sunlight tracing slanted patterns across the tiles.

Lunch was just as sticky. The fresh air and the sunlight made Feynriel squint. There was an open lecture on the elves of Arlathan and even though it was going to be frustrating, all of history full of so much personal conjecture, Feynriel intended to go.

‘Sounds like a good time for a nap,’ Connor had said when Feynriel mentioned the possibility the first time, with a roll of his eyes that suited him less and less the more his beard grew.

But Connor was waiting for Feynriel outside, the top few buttons of his collar down, a smear of arcane residue on his cheek—breathing hard, as though he thought he was late.

Feynriel leaned over to wipe it off as he passed by. His legs were longer than Connor’s now, and Connor had to scramble through the sandy pathway to keep up, rubbing at his cheek and making it pink.

‘It’s gone now,’ Feynriel told him.

‘I can’t _believe_ we’re going to this,’ Connor said, still scrubbing. ‘I could be doing something a lot more comfortable. Like offering myself as a training mage in the amphitheater. Dodging gladiator spears all afternoon—at least _that_ would be interesting.’

‘They’ll probably touch on the old god Dumat,’ Feynriel said.

‘Dragons?’ Connor asked, then had to cough to hide the sudden vein of interest in his voice.

Feynriel didn’t bother hiding his smile. It was always dragons with Fereldans.

The hall was designed for acoustics, but it wasn’t large, seats close enough for dialogue rather than for Connor’s preference of napping. Their feet touched once when they sat, Feynriel’s boots against Connor’s open sandals, and Connor nearly snapped a strap in his hurry to scoot his foot away.

‘Didn’t get much sleep last night? Jumpy?’ Feynriel thought he sounded devious enough for Connor to appreciate the inside joke, but Connor looked away, his cheek still red from where he’d been rubbing at it. ‘Fine,’ Feynriel added, straightening his posture, hands on his knees. If he looked over-eager to learn, then Connor would laugh about it later, eyes shut and mouth open and bent double in the street—and Feynriel would remind him his collar was open, and Connor would pretend it was on purpose, to show off the few hairs on his chest or something equally inane.

The lecture wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t interesting, either. Feynriel blinked long and slow, the leaves of the Arlathan forest at the backs of his eyelids. He expected a square of parchment lobbed at his temple, but Connor had nothing with him, and no impact came.

Blood magic, old gods, the Golden City. Affection and desire and regret—not from lessons learned, but from fortunes lost, or fortunes never received—colored the magister’s voice, Andraeus Thalsian, named after but not related to the infamous archon of old.

Some people were too predictable. Feynriel hid his yawns the way he often hid his smiles. He knew the stories already, such as they were, but he wished he could slip into the dreams of dead things, the echoes of the past trapped in time-scoured stone.

‘I feel so educated now,’ Connor said, popping the crick in his neck while the shuffle of feet and long robes filled the little room. It made a real sound this time, sudden and sharp amidst the other whispers; Feynriel blinked again, but the backs of his eyelids were all black, no hint of sunlight-dappled green. ‘Dinner?’

‘Already engaged,’ Feynriel replied.

‘Like they’ll notice you’re not there.’ Connor messed with his sandal strap, bending down to make sure it wasn’t about to break, displaying a length of hairy calf. ‘I just suffered through the elves of Arlathan for you.’

‘There _were_ dragons,’ Feynriel reminded him.

‘Not enough of them to make up for all the elves,’ Connor replied.

‘That’s my mother you’re talking about,’ Feynriel said—and not because of any personal slight, but to see the look on Connor’s face when he drew up short, stumbling over nothing, pretending it was a stone caught between the callused sole of his foot and the leather sole of his sandal.

For a Fereldan, he colored far too easily. Feynriel was still surprised his master hadn’t seen fit to pluck that impulse in its budding stages, before it grew tall and resilient as an old olive tree.

‘Come to dinner,’ Connor repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Don’t make me beg—if only because everyone’s finally stopped with the unflattering mabari comparisons.’

‘If you’re worried about that, then you might want to shave.’ Feynriel watched as Connor shifted his touch, palm sliding around to his jaw; already, he could feel the foundations of his resolve crumbling. _Always know the outcome of a situation before you give your answer,_ Feynriel’s master had been known to say. _The element of surprise should always be under your control._ ‘…It’d have to be an early night, anyway.’

‘The earliest,’ Connor said. Briefly, Feynriel wondered what it must be like not to worry about letting others know, with a quirk of his mouth or a wrinkle at the corner of his eye, exactly what he was thinking—the emotions he felt and the emotions he didn’t, the smiles and the yawns he chose not to shadow.

Then, just as simply, Feynriel let that pass—to each mage, his own light armor. There were always certain strained confines to the stretch of a man’s imagination in the waking world, and Feynriel saw no need to dwell on limitations.

*

Dinner was a heady affair—wine and spiced meats shaved from an enormous slab instead of pale broths and paler fruits, the thin breads and thick oils preferred in his master’s household. Feynriel picked at the overripe figs on the garden table just beneath Connor’s bedroom window, and drank a shade too much; he fell into his cold bed long after his master’s party had concluded, all the candles in the atrium extinguished, the halls smelling of smoke and sweet melted wax and echoing with faded laughter.

He slept deeply with the wine in his belly and passed into the Fade more quickly than ever. Its muted tones greeted him with high columns and bare marble floors, the shapes and structures of his master’s summer villa in Marnus Pell—kept for when the weather in Minrathous grew too humid and so many of the magisters chose to migrate.

Light breezes stirred the wheat fields beyond the portico, the bearded stalks swaying, soothing and shy.

It wasn’t often that Feynriel visited a place of someone else’s design—not often that he wound up alone, instead of following the twisting twine of another man’s dreams, wary of thorns.

But someone was calling him, using Feynriel’s proper name to do it. It was even a pleasant voice, familiar, deep as the taut skin of a party-drum being struck at its center, and it sent fine tremors along the separate vertebrae of Feynriel’s spine.

The shadow of a dragon stood before him in the wheat fields. Feynriel cupped his face in one hand, leaning on the stone railing to watch, before the dragon became a man again.

 _Fereldans and their legends,_ Feynriel thought against the rise of his quickening pulse. He knew the man who’d called him here, though he hadn’t known Hawke was a mage of such power. He was persuasive, yes, but dreams had other ingredients.

Arishoks, for example. Hidden kisses, dark impulses, old wounds. Feynriel had let them be because unburying them was a poor way to repay the only man who’d shown him kindness in a city that had all but been bled dry of the notion.

It fetched no coin, not even a handful of coppers, in the marketplace.

‘Feynriel,’ Hawke said.

‘Hawke,’ Feynriel replied. The wind tugged at his hair; even in the Fade, it disobeyed him, slipping free of its braid.

‘You might wonder what I’m doing here,’ Hawke continued, stepping closer.

‘Actually,’ Feynriel told him, ‘I’m not, really.’

‘…Because I know someone who knows someone who may or may not have come into some lyrium,’ Hawke added. ‘It was all very exciting.’

They met on the stairs to the portico, Hawke parting the wheat like a ship and leaving a trail of broken stalks in his wake.

There was a streak of crimson across the familiar shape of his once-broken nose, the lump of cartilage forever damaging the symmetry of the bridge, and there were new wrinkles in his brow that the fall of his dark hair couldn’t hide. But his eyes held the same deep-set mirth, and there was that slant touch of humor tucked into the corner of his mouth, a wicked thing to see, and always—somehow—hopeful.

‘It’s been a while,’ Hawke said. ‘Sorry about the dragon thing. Bit dramatic, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s still not the strangest thing I’ve seen, though.’ Feynriel searched Hawke’s face for scars, his hair for gray, his furred pauldrons for the signs of wear and tear and stormy weather. He looked sunburned, maybe a little, but that might have been a concept as much as it was a truth—how he felt rather than who he was. That was the secret of dreaming; there was nothing to trust beyond belief, and most knew they couldn’t trust that at all. For all the truths it revealed, it obscured just as many, always shifting, always shaking.

‘Tevinter. Right.’ Hawke seemed impressed; he leaned against the railing of the portico, against one bare elbow, glancing at the sights around them, accepting the columns and the shade and the marbled tiling with a nod of his head. ‘I can imagine it’s always dragons in the Imperium, at least as far as Minrathous. Sleeping in a bed of dragonbone with a staff of dragonwing, is that it?’

‘I think dragons are more of a Fereldan thing,’ Feynriel replied. ‘Didn’t _you_ fight a dragon?’

‘A high dragon.’ Hawke cleared his throat. ‘…So they say, that is. Got a fire gland out of it and everything. Don’t tell me you’ve been keeping up with my exploits? I can assure you—they’re mostly delusions. Outright lies, in some cases. You remember Varric—’

‘Was that the one who almost got me killed?’ Feynriel asked.

‘I usually describe him as the one without a beard,’ Hawke said. ‘But that’s why I don’t write the stories, _or_ read them. Not a hint of poetry in me.’

Feynriel shook his head, and the memories quieted, neither his stubborn youth nor his equally stubborn fears strong enough to catch him in the Fade, not even when he was standing still. ‘You’re popular in Tevinter,’ he explained. ‘The stories—the rumors.’

‘If only I could be a little more popular everywhere else,’ Hawke agreed.

Feynriel laughed, a polite laugh he’d learned from a handsome archon, which made Hawke turn and watch him carefully through all the mists and shadows that comprised their meeting place. It was only fair; Feynriel had studied him, and now Hawke was doing the same in return, rubbing at his beard just like Connor did, and not as a distraction tactic to hide the fact that he was staring.

It must have been a Fereldan thing, more prevalent than dogs or darkspawn or dragons.

Feynriel wouldn’t know. He’d only ever been there in dreaming.

‘So,’ Hawke said at last, ‘you might be wondering why I’m here. Sort of. In a manner of speaking.’

‘Everyone dreams,’ Feynriel replied, calm despite his curiosity.

Hawke laughed at that, not a polite laugh, more of a snort or something closer to a bark. The comparisons made themselves, but Feynriel smiled anyway, listening to the sound Hawke’s beard made when he touched it—the sound Hawke thought it made, something that soothed as much as it hushed, quiet and warm and darker than the color of Connor’s hair.

‘You’re good at this…mysterious dream-walking thing, aren’t you?’ Hawke asked. ‘Better than I am, anyway.’

‘And I’m sure you’re better at slaying high dragons.’ Feynriel folded his arms into his sleeves, even though the fabric felt like nothing, and the only thing that made his arms his arms was the pulse at his wrists, the pulse that drove everything.

‘Wise words,’ Hawke said.

‘It’s easy to be wise when you’re dreaming,’ Feynriel told him.

The platitudes sounded like someone else talking. There was something that held them apart—time and distance, on the one hand, and Hawke’s instinctive wariness on the other, which Feynriel smelled and tasted and heard but didn’t feel. It was a spell Hawke wasn’t accustomed to, and required a relaxation most people never achieved. That the Fade was a dangerous place where a mage always had to be on his guard was something even apostates understood, even magisters—wariness was cleverness and cleverness meant keeping the shadows from under the skin.

‘You could at least _pretend_ to be interested.’ Hawke sighed, another color, but there was still laughter in it. ‘All right. Fine. Maybe you can’t. Maybe eagerness is the _worst_ thing to indulge in, in the Fade. Like I said—you’re better at all this than I am.’

‘Well,’ Feynriel said. For once, the flush of his own emotion made it through the veil, and he toed the marbled ground with the tip of his boot, almost feeling himself connect with something solid. It wasn’t shy, and it wasn’t embarrassed. It simply was, the product of a good compliment offered by a confident voice. ‘I _have_ been practicing.’

‘I bet it’s a good story. If Varric hadn’t almost gotten you killed that one time, maybe you could tell it to him.’ Hawke looked pleased with himself, before the wrinkles in his brow deepened. ‘How about this: I didn’t think it would be polite to come so close without saying hello. Old friends are few and far between. The rest are pirates now, I think, and _they_ hardly count.’

‘Where _are_ you?’ Feynriel asked, suddenly keen. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of the question before. Maybe it was the dragon, part of the ploy that Fereldans knew instinctively—something everyone else was just as susceptible to, only they didn’t expect it.

If there was a dragon in the room—in the dream, in the story, in the wheat field—then chances were no one would notice anything else.

‘Funny you should ask that,’ Hawke replied, with a whistle the same color as aurum. ‘Have you ever heard of Marnus Pell?’

‘You aren’t serious,’ Feynriel said, flat as the blade of an old gladiator’s oldest weapon.

‘Rarely,’ Hawke agreed, ‘but I make it a point never to joke about a visit to the Imperium.’

When Feynriel closed his eyes, he could taste the salt in the air rolling in from the Nocen Sea. He could see the old buildings in the agora, pitted with ocean-side weather and ocean-side winds, the long years eating through the limestone as surely as a worm ate through paper. It was difficult to imagine Hawke settled down at the center of that, his lean arms sunburned, the red tattoo painted at the crook of his elbow. Questions came to Feynriel one by one, taking little shapes like the lazy flies swarming the open barrels of fish heads and tails that sold for soup at the price of a few copper coins. _How_ came first, followed immediately by _why_ , and completed by _alone?_

Feynriel had no voice for them, but his tongue buzzed in his mouth, the insistent flutter of an insect’s wings.

‘It must get tiring, being Champion of Kirkwall all the time,’ Feynriel said, not a question, recalling the element of surprise. A mage had to corral it like a few gladiators around a qunari in the ring, with weighted nets, all arms to hand. ‘Are you running from your adoring fans?’

‘Just a few dozen of the most eager.’ Hawke shrugged one-shouldered, the movement stirring his furred pauldrons. He reminded Feynriel of a dog shaking itself dry after a swim. His grin was crooked, the same smile he’d offered the Tevinter slaver who’d held a knife to Feynriel’s throat—about to strike a bargain, or simply about to strike. The stiff collar of Feynriel’s robes felt like a pale imitation of that steel, fluttering against his pulse with the Nocen breeze. ‘Thimble-heads just can’t keep their hands off me. You know how it is, of course.’

Feynriel did.

‘…So you aren’t going to tell me why you’re in Marnus Pell,’ he said, imagining the chill prickle of his master’s disapproval, even while he slept beneath a silken canopy. _Never ask outright what you can make a man want to answer without question,_ he would have said, and he would have been right.

But his master was an older man, comfortable in his status, with gilded ears. He understood what it was to feel young blood’s impatience but he no longer felt it for himself, Feynriel’s pulse pounding even in the Fade.

‘I need you, Feynriel,’ Hawke said, the words so simple that they became impossible. In Tevinter, simplicity was always the deception, an elegant lie that hid the tangled mess of truth beneath. ‘Will you come?’

He needn’t have asked, Feynriel thought, but then Hawke was always so particular about the strangest of things. He’d gamble a lad’s throat in the caves along the Wounded Coast, then fight demons for him in the Fade in order to save his mind, his life. Perhaps that, too, was a Fereldan trait—and only Feynriel, as an outsider, could fail to understand where the mud and dragons met with the good manners.

And if asking politely came from Ferelden, then agreeing without promising came from the Imperium.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Feynriel said. He twisted a lock of hair around his finger where it had come loose, soft strands binding the skin tight. ‘It’s early in the season, yet…’

Hawke reached forward, laying a hand on Feynriel’s shoulder. It was insubstantial, as was everything else in the Fade—save for the shades that were born there—but it had some weight, the heat from Hawke’s skin creeping through his summer robes.

‘I trust you,’ Hawke told him. The wind buffeted their faces, stirring the fringe of Hawke’s hair from his eyes. It wanted cutting, not the same way Feynriel’s wanted cutting, not on purpose. Feynriel could feel their surroundings stir as their shared dream began to roll off, morning mist sliding in off the bay. ‘You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

Feynriel did know, but that was more than half the trouble.

*

The rest came when he woke to find his master already loading the painted caravans bound for Marnus Pell. He stood in the walkway in the front garden, near the flowering vines, wearing dark silks.

The slaves all had their sleeves rolled up—they were men, not elves, luckless sailors and once-proud mercenaries, and they were sweating beneath their collars, under their arms, down the smalls of their backs and between their shoulder-blades.

‘I just don’t know if I understand,’ Feynriel said, folding his arms in his new summer robes, bare feet on the stone path. ‘It’s a little early to be leaving the city, isn’t it?’

‘That _is_ the point, Feynriel,’ his master replied. ‘Arriving before the crowd ensures an established position for when the social season begins. We’ll be settled, while all the others are scrambling to air out their bedrooms and sweep the sand from their porticos. Preparation is only ever as effective as the number of people who _don’t_ have to see it.’

Sunlight glinted off the tips of his ears. Feynriel fought the urge to fuss with his, rubbing misshapen cartilage between thumb and forefinger and reminding everyone with eyes of who he was and what he wasn’t. _Never touch what you don’t want,_ his master said.

There was a spell in that, too, drawing attention, shifting luck, tempting fate—or giving a merchant reason to force a sale.

Feynriel gripped his wrists inside his sleeves instead, and watched the slaves wipe sweat from their brows, the colored canvas behind them, the blue sky behind that.

‘I should pack,’ Feynriel said.

‘You really should,’ his master agreed.

There were summer robes in Feynriel’s private room, probably too many of them, all high-collared to match the styles his master preferred. Feynriel would be his own mage some day, perhaps a master of his own faceless future pupil, but the high collars suited him, better than the low and open: a swath of cloth draped around the shoulders at night like a few of the other archons wore, or Connor’s master, who was so often away. The robes weren’t as important as the staff, but they were just as complicated, a collection of buttons and doublets and clasps and buckles, a few pauldrons, snips of cording amidst so much silk.

The fall and the drape and the sway—dressing the part helped with acting it—were oceans away from the alienage, home-spun trousers that barely fell below Feynriel’s knees, somewhere too tight against his calves and too high above his ankles. The distance was more pronounced than whatever stretched between Marnus Pell and Minrathous or even Marothius, nestled into the Hundred Pillars, so close to the borders of the Imperium but still within its auspices. It wasn’t the distance between Hightown and Lowtown, either, finery imported all the way from Orlais and worn to hot garden parties—or so Feynriel heard; or so he imagined.

Feynriel packed them all, save for what he was currently wearing.

There were slaves to help with that too, less sweaty, polite and pleasant as shadows—and, his master would say, just as trustworthy. The household was busy, soon to be less so, quiet and tended and nearly empty. Feynriel thought about predictions and positions and the eternal question of _luck or fate_ , folding the silks as he did, accepting life in Tevinter had these pitfalls, these possibilities. They were one and the same.

A man whose dreams you only wished to haunt visited you in yours without hesitation; it was expected or it was accidental, but acceptance was the first step toward abolishing surprise.

Feynriel was careful to fold the silks in such a way that they wouldn’t wrinkle. He ate breakfast with a light summer cloak beside him, reading, only distracted when his hair fell into his eyes, when his braid nearly dipped like a brush into the bowl of honey.

Travel could be exciting, but all the bumps in the road were enough to upset his balance already. He calmed himself the same way he did before bed, those early nights when sleep itself chased him. The incense, the steady breathing—his master’s fingertips against his wrist rather than his own, a thumb pressed into his pulse to remind it _slowly, slowly_.

He was a vision of poise itself when the rock flew through his open window—smaller than it could have been, but larger than a pebble. It skidded over the floor, dancing on the tiles, a clatter and commotion that fell to rest in front of Feynriel’s left foot.

Rocks were thrown in the alienage, too, but usually with a more meaningful precision. Feynriel had caught one at the corner of his brow once, but it didn’t scar, even if he bled—down over his eyelid, making him see through filmy pink.

At least one of the elves hadn’t thrown it, and not where his mother could see, just a drunk stumbling home from the Hanged Man. If Feynriel had kept his head down, it might have clipped his ear, or hit his temple, but he refused to do that.

It wasn’t why the stone was thrown, but it didn’t shield him from it, either.

There was a little dent in the tile where the rock had landed, smooth and still-warm from the sunlight outside. Feynriel picked it up and used it to hold his place, settled onto the page like a paperweight.

‘Took you long enough,’ Connor said, all the way down below, when Feynriel leaned out the window. He shielded his eyes with his palm and crooked fingers, and Feynriel wondered why he hadn’t just used a spell or perhaps a courier. His collar was open, and there was sweat on his throat, his braid sticking to it before he flicked it away.

‘I was busy,’ Feynriel said. ‘I was packing.’

‘Because everyone cares so much about what _you’ll_ be wearing in Marnus Pell.’ Connor tried to roll his eyes, but he was too busy squinting. ‘Aren’t you going to come down?’

Feynriel met him in the garden, the careful system of pathways woven together just as neatly as the stitching on his robes, with an open stretch for the vineyard. Connor scratched at his chest, as flushed and breathless as always, smelling of breakfast.

‘You’re here because you learned we were leaving early.’ Feynriel settled on a bench while Connor stood to tug a trailing vine, more gently than he might have, careful not to break it. It even curled around his fingers, while he allowed the gesture, all growing things drawn to him in some quiet way. Feynriel could feel all the leaves swaying, all the roots shifting. ‘But it isn’t that far away. It’s only for the summer, and with any luck, you might finally come this time.’

‘That’s _not_ why I’m here,’ Connor said.

Feynriel tapped his thighs through their silks. _Answers are just as dangerous as questions,_ his master might as well have said.

That was why Feynriel didn’t consider telling Connor about Hawke. The secret swelled in his chest like an overripe grape in autumn—though all the fruiting buds were closed and green, too far from the proper season to look anything close to their potential. Feynriel glanced up to Connor, and Connor dropped onto the marble, leaning closer on one flat palm.

‘My master’s come back early,’ he said, voice low and colored with barely-hidden excitement. ‘He says we’re migrating south before the crowds this season—which means we’re coming to Marnus Pell _with_ you.’

Feynriel tapped his index finger against the cold stone bench, tracing his master’s training sigils over the smooth-planed rock. He could feel Connor’s eyes on him, bright gaze watchful, meaningful, and waiting for something that Feynriel couldn’t provide.

The longer he waited for an answer, the less satisfaction he’d find in any he received—even if it was the right one after all.

‘Oh,’ Feynriel said at last. He felt the grape of his secret burst, sweet juices running over the bitter tannins of torn fruit-skin. Like the bench beneath him, his lips were cold despite the warmth of the day. It would have been prudent to say something—anything—but the words drifted from him like will o’ wisps, their fragile bodies too light in the evening air. ‘…That’s wonderful.’

Connor’s face went slack, the vine around his fingers curling away, leaves browning from the stems outward. Something tugged at the corner of his mouth, the vulnerable swell of his full lower lip offset by the bristling hairs beneath it. Sweat beaded at the side of his neck, skin tan from the open collars of his robes, where he refused to fasten the little bone buttons.

Feynriel watched his chest rise and fall, affecting a languid blink.

‘I _thought_ you’d be happy.’ Connor touched the inside of his own wrist with his thumb, shaking the dead things off. ‘But of course you aren’t. Ever. …Even though you’re always talking about how you don’t know anyone outside of Minrathous. Don’t you see? I’m saving you from a month of boredom by the seaside. The least you could do is thank me, only you look like one of my master’s Orlesian warhorses chewing honeyed oatcakes.’

Feynriel laughed, the sound escaping him before he could chase it down and bite it back.

‘You’ve even got your mane braided like theirs,’ Connor added. He reached over to tweak the end of it, thumb rubbing over the fringed tips like a calligrapher cleaning his brushes. ‘I bet your room’s less of a mess than their stables, though.’

‘You’re coming to Marnus Pell,’ Feynriel repeated, just to be certain he’d heard it right. There were moments when his attention drifted, the wind bringing him other conversations—dreamers whispering even during his conscious hours.

It happened rarely now, thanks to his master, years of meditation and private lessons standing like a wall between him and the restlessness he knew. But Feynriel still wasn’t able to trust his own ears or pretend he heard nothing when he heard so much.

‘Yes—and we’re traveling by elephant.’ Connor swayed back and forth, mimicking the great beast’s lumbering gait.

‘The southern road’s too narrow for elephants,’ Feynriel said.

‘Then I guess we’ll just be following you in a caravan, just like everyone else,’ Connor replied.

There was still something odd about his face, features steady and measured instead of alive with movement—more like the plaster cast of a solstice mask, painted in gilt and hung on the door overnight. Feynriel wondered at it, but his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of Hawke, the mysterious charge he’d left with Feynriel during their meeting in the Fade.

 _I need you, Feynriel._ If Feynriel hadn’t known better, he would have said it was a demon, finding a way into his heart at last.

Only time and distance would tell, the dust on the Imperial Highway, a few brief nights spent roadside in the company of strangers known as _old acquaintances_ rather than _old friends_. What they owed his master, and what his master intended to collect in other ways, and the scent of the sea fading before it grew stronger again.

It wouldn’t be easy to slip away and meet a well-known fugitive with Connor in Marnus Pell—Connor, dogging his footsteps like the mabari he always claimed he wasn’t, despite the shared affinity for whiskers. The thought of it made Feynriel want to pinch the delicate cartilage in the bridge of his nose, but he refrained, listening instead to the soft scrape of linen on stone as Connor stood, the shuffle of his sandal-soles on the sand.

‘The more you study, the less fun you are to be around,’ Connor announced, brushing the dust from his robes, fingers running over his thighs. ‘I think it’s that master of yours. If you start to look like him, this—’ He gestured between them, ‘—I’m telling you right now, it’s all over.’

‘You don’t know him,’ Feynriel said.

Not everyone could be like Connor’s master, wandering six months of the year to explore the Donarks, or braving the lost dwarven thaig of Kal-Sharok. Some men preferred to stay at home and teach their pupils rather than bringing them lavish gifts from Orlais and the Anderfels whenever the seasons turned, meeting them somewhere in between for a few hardened constitutionals before disappearing again, less predictable than high tide.

But maybe Connor was better suited to being on his own, to thinking the big house that wasn’t his could at least be his to run for a time that was in-between.

Feynriel didn’t know. Connor didn’t speak much of the home he’d had before and kept his feelings for it locked in nesting boxes in his dreams, somewhere always far-away. Perhaps there’d been too much attention in his past, or he was accustomed to too little, but either extreme must have made the adaptation easy.

Connor frowned outright, as though he thought the accusation meant something more than it did—something personal, instead of a general statement, that the strongest of magisters allowed no one to know them, and that was how they maintained and cultivated their strength. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know him. You’re right.’

‘He’s difficult to know,’ Feynriel offered, which was a kindness, or so he thought.

Connor didn’t seem to think so, and left with no excuses soon after. He still had to pack, and Feynriel was finished with that task already; it would irk him like sand beneath his robes and dust in his eyes that Feynriel might arrive somewhere before him—which Feynriel was always doing, these days, long legs and clear gaze, while Connor stopped to observe a trinket on a neighboring table, or to chat with a savvy merchant, or to tangle his fingers in some pretty, aimless vine, giving it new shape over the stone it clung to.

*

They were alone on the road with only their entourage, kept simple as Feynriel’s master believed best. The black spires disappeared behind them, domed peaks piercing the cloudless sky, and so did the ocean, as the Imperial Highway traveled inland.

Feynriel didn’t look behind him, because when one knew where and what one was leaving, glances cast over the shoulder were unnecessary, not even an indulgence.

‘If there’s one thing you can trust,’ his master said, ‘it’s that the Imperial Highway is long.’

It was, though it was never empty, merchants and mages traveling separately or together. Some were slaves, caravans stretching long and dark from the High Reaches, those that came by land rather than by pirate galleon. Yet few were headed toward Minrathous this late in the season, and those that did were less colorful, from nowhere more distant than Vol Dorma.

Feynriel didn’t sleep on the road. The jaunt of their pace was too soothing for that, deceptively so, and he meditated instead, so that each sudden bump and jostle meant nothing to him.

They did sleep once between Minrathous and Vol Dorma, on the farm of _an old acquaintance_. There were chickens, and a vineyard so wide there was no end to it; there were little bugs everywhere, flocking around the lanterns set in each guest-room, but Feynriel had too much elvhen blood in him.

They didn’t bite.

He searched for Hawke again, but Hawke wasn’t dreaming. Maybe he wasn’t sleeping, either. The familiar ports against each storm—the silence his master left in his wake, his travels and his hidden meetings and his secret bargains, and Connor’s predictable restlessness—meant little in the space of what wasn’t found, the Champion who for once wasn’t fighting through sleep for respite that never came.

Feynriel knew what it meant to get little rest. He wasn’t in a dark mood from weariness when they reached Vol Dorma, nor when they spent a few more days there on the business of being social; he didn’t scan the horizon for signs of fresh travelers from the capital, and he meditated each night before sleep, so he wouldn’t enter the Fade too eagerly.

Demons always heard a want that keen. It even called out to spirits, and there were times their cautions sounded just like promises.

But they were in no hurry to reach Marnus Pell, and Vol Dorma had news and parties of its own, and on the third day Feynriel’s master killed a man—efficiently, not brutally—a slaver with a crooked staff, who felt some debt was owed to him, and collected due payment of a different sort than he demanded.

‘I feel better now,’ Feynriel’s master said, washing his hands in a low bowl of water. They’d never been dirty; it was a bloodless thing, not done for show. Feynriel held up a towel for him and he appreciated the gesture, nodding once, drying his fingers; when he was finished, he rubbed his palms together, and the thin skin whispered lifeline to lifeline.

 _I need you, Feynriel,_ Hawke had said, presumably not for these little gestures, but something larger and less routine.

The next morning, they moved on, veering west from the highway to Marnus Pell. The winds picked up and smelled of salty stretches and deep waters, the open ocean with Seheron so far in the distance it couldn’t be seen. They passed farms on their way, fields worked by country slaves, and no social obligations to greet _old acquaintances_ , or spend the night amongst the fat flies buzzing and buzzing.

*

The gates of Marnus Pell were open—they were always open. No high, black spires awaited them, but there were stout domes in the distance, and the arches of the old amphitheater, and Feynriel covered a yawn with one hand, his body more weary than anything else.

He was grateful not for a bedroom of his own—sleep was what mattered most, and not where it was found—but for the consistency, the familiarity, the touchstones, the rooms he remembered and the hallways he knew. They were streets he recognized, if only in this season, houses and sharp turns and an agora, open fountains, villas growing larger and larger the closer they drew to the fresh smell of Nocen Sea. There was dust in Feynriel’s boots and dust beneath the fabric of his belts, in the slim weave of the cording, the knot tied in a bolt of silk gritty when he rubbed it between his fingers.

Connor was waiting for them when Feynriel alighted, by the vine-tangled gates of their summer pavilion.

Feynriel wasn’t the least bit surprised.

‘You must have stayed a few nights in Vol Dorma,’ Connor said casually, offering Feynriel his hand to help him down. Feynriel’s legs were long enough to make it on his own; he managed easily without the help, and then, to soothe Connor’s sense of Fereldan pride, leaned into his touch to work a pebble out of the sole of his boot. Amidst the commotion of unloading, Connor’s palm and fingers were warm, with the same raw heat as the open road.

‘Did you have fun riding your elephant?’ Feynriel asked.

‘Tremendous,’ Connor replied.

‘You can’t stop in Vol Dorma with elephants, after all,’ Feynriel said.

‘No,’ Connor agreed, letting his thumb fall against the top of Feynriel’s hand where his skin was thin. He traced a green vein shaped like the Imperial Highway, from Vol Dorma to Perivantium, Feynriel’s wrist to the root of his ring finger. ‘There’s no space for them—they get all restless, and have you ever tried to ride on a restless elephant, Feynriel? It’s murder on the thighs; I’m chafing something terrible.’

He scratched his leg as if to prove the point, hitching his fingers against the thin, pale cotton. Feynriel flicked his pebble free, straightening to reclaim his hand.

‘You’ve been sleeping well,’ Feynriel said. It wasn’t a question, merely an observation, taking in the tenor of Connor’s voice and the spring in his step, and the quality of his expressions.

His face was different now, sun-burnt, reveling in movement. Noticing the change had no relevance to their conversation, but Feynriel did so all the same, and he felt a slim tendril of relief curl around his ribs like vines climbing a trellis.

The only thing they’d ever had in common was sleep, or rather, what came after it. They’d met sleeplessly, both of them avoiding the Fade; they’d learned to navigate it separately, but also together.

‘It’s all the sunlight,’ Connor admitted, turning his face toward the sky. ‘It’s good for a man. Makes him feel… I don’t know. _Ruddy._ ’

‘Ruddy,’ Feynriel repeated.

‘ _Ruddy,_ ’ Connor said.

There were no shadows beneath his eyes, though Feynriel could see the continuation of sunburn on his throat and across the bridge of his nose. Connor’s complexion was fair for a Fereldan’s, unfreckled and white as his master’s china instruments, used for divining.

Hawke had freckles, three in a pyramid at the back of his neck, forming the start of a constellation of which Feynriel had never seen the full scope. He could picture them easily in his mind even still, skin marked as if with a spatter of ink droplets, the same little imperfections on the letters he’d once sent, when he still had the time for writing.

Hawke hadn’t told Feynriel where he was staying or even where they were expected to meet. Feynriel had to admit now that he’d been hoping simply arriving in Marnus Pell might bring him a clearer picture, after a nap like a promise kept and a dream like an appointment, rather than a chance meeting. But instead of staring down his wide, white bed, its canopy fluttering with the sea-breezes, he was staring down Connor, half a head shorter and, for once, half a step ahead, scratching the back of his neck, looking ruddy as he’d claimed.

‘Come and see our estate,’ Connor said, tucking his hands into the gold weave of his wide belt. There were no pockets to spoil the line of his robes, but he’d come up with something that suited him just as well, knuckles curled against the brocade. ‘They’ll be unpacking for hours in your place—and you won’t be able to get any sleep anyway, not with all that knocking about.’

Feynriel could sleep anywhere, through anything, and the pleasant twinkle at the depths of Connor’s eyes said he knew it too, the lines at the corners, the tilt of one dark brow. In the distance, the gentle rhythm of the ocean could be heard, waves rolling in and out as birds wheeled lazily overhead, calling to one another over the rush of water.

Feynriel had visited the Kirkwall docks in his youth, air stinking of brine and the bilgewater dumped from landing ships. He watched the fat sails blow in and out until a smuggler called him knife-ear without bothering to take a second look, when he was still small enough those things mattered; it was the same day he’d stepped in a puddle of something gray and filmy outside the fish guttery, the same day he’d stopped going back to the docks to watch the ships sail in, but mostly out.

Tevinter had clean, white beaches, scattered with shells to collect, bits of colored glass, beaten wet-wood washed ashore from shipwrecks in the Nocen Sea—and the occasional crate of sodden biscuits and soggy incense, broken bottles of bracken poisons, from pirates sending their cargo overboard rather than having it seized by the authorities.

Hawke’s friend had been a pirate; Feynriel remembered her, the same as everyone else probably did. He wondered if Hawke had sailed with her, and if this was the stretch of land he’d chosen to cast anchor while the ship sailed on for yet sunnier climes.

‘All right,’ Feynriel said, mindful of the dangers involved in reverie. ‘I’ll come, but I can’t stay for dinner.’

‘Don’t do me any favors or anything.’ Connor rubbed the back of his neck after scratching it too hard, as though he thought he could rub some of the sun’s heat from his skin. ‘Once you see the elephant stables, you’ll be begging to stay all week.’

‘Why are you so obsessed with elephants?’ Feynriel asked.

Connor flicked his braid over the front of his shoulder instead of letting it fall against the back. Feynriel hated that feeling, hair in his eyes or tickling his throat, not uncomfortable but one of too many little distractions. ‘Why aren’t _you_?’ Connor replied.

*

Not all the villas looked the same, baked tiles set into the rooftops, the scent of clay and salt and stone, the pathways wide and well-walked even though the day was quiet. Each summer pavilion had its own bright burst of color in the gardens; Feynriel’s master chose deep reds to match the colors of his robes, night-blossoms purple as a bruise, flushed as life-blood, but there were white blooms, trellises and bowers and water lilies, in the gardens Connor’s master kept—or told others to keep for him, as he did with so many other things.

‘He’s not around,’ Connor said, tossing a grape from hand to hand before he popped it into his mouth. ‘I can see you looking, you know. It’s not as though he expects all the politeness and the frippery—you wouldn’t even have to bow.’

‘Yes, I would,’ Feynriel replied.

Connor sighed. ‘That’s _your_ choice, not mine.’

There was a bronto skull near the outside dining table, baked pure white. Feynriel sipped spiced water and felt the skull’s eyeless sockets staring at him until Connor laughed, and waved one hand damp from the moisture on the grapes; leaves wound their way around the bone, blooming through the slits for the nostrils, the bared, sharp teeth overlaid with glistening green life.

‘Party tricks.’ Feynriel shook his head. ‘You’ll be popular for the next month, I’m sure.’

‘ _You’re_ in a mood,’ Connor said. ‘Sourer than these grapes. Have _you_ been sleeping well?’

The topic was sore, and Connor tried to look innocent afterward. Feynriel swallowed his water the wrong way, the sun so far from setting, the breezes cool but all the dust from the open road making itself known in uncomfortable places. Full elves probably didn’t feel the prickle and the sting, bare feet on raw dirt, and Feynriel fanned himself pointedly while Connor leaned closer on the table, spinning a grape round and round beneath his forefinger.

‘Good conversation,’ he said.

‘When did you get here?’ Feynriel asked. ‘Because last I checked, I just arrived. We’ve been on the road for days _and_ nights now, and it’s not _my_ job to entertain you.’

Connor stopped the grape spinning with his thumb, cleaned it off against his sleeve, and ate it. For once, he chewed and swallowed before he spoke. ‘Yesterday morning. You…probably want a bath or something. _Do_ you bathe, or are you just naturally clean? Is it another elf-thing? Is that look you’re giving me _really_ as sharp as a good Dalish arrow?’

Feynriel coughed to cover his inevitable laugh, and Connor nudged his booted ankle with a bare toe until Feynriel nudged him back.

‘If you haven’t been sleeping—’ Connor began, leaning even closer.

There was some commotion from within, past the portico, through the columns, where the shadows were dark and the sun didn’t penetrate, beyond a hall full of artifacts that spoke of _somewhere else_ and never _here_ , the sorts of things Connor liked looking at in the Minrathous agora or picking out of the pages of ancient texts—the objects instead of the theories. _I wonder what that might do, or if you’d only end up keeping it by the bedside table for creams and things,_ Connor would say, having flipped through a tome for its illustrations sometime during a late, sultry afternoon while Feynriel did his best not to be distracted by all the talking, or the heat at his pulse, or the hair slipping loose from his braid.

Patience and concentration, regular breathing, one sentence following the one before it and preceding the one after. Logic and order to make sense of all the dreaming. Skeletons to structure living flesh; blood to chart the course of magic; vessels for all things, to hold and maintain.

Feynriel stood. Connor’s master appeared moments after that, unfurling his light cloak, snapping open the bone clasp and tossing it over the back of a low chair.

‘What are we eating?’ he asked, and clapped his hands together. His hair was as dark as ever, beard clipped fine; he reminded Feynriel of a menagerie lion, shaggy and sleek and predatorily lazy, but that required a careful landscaping all its own, treating appearance as topiary.

It took a great deal of planning to appear casual.

Feynriel bowed, not casual at all, but polite. The whisper of his silks was the same as the whisper of his master’s palms together.

‘What we’re always eating around these parts.’ Connor sighed. His master nodded and took his seat, boots planted wide, dipping bread in oil. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a shank of meat or some smelly cheeses.’

‘Is that the Fereldan in you, or is it the Orlesian?’ his master asked around a mouthful of food.

Connor glanced at Feynriel, his sunburn redder than ever. His master had one to match, but against darker skin, and sweat, hair swept back from his face, collar undone. Feynriel saw all the similarities between them and all the differences, the way Connor laughed and the way his master laughed, the way Connor scratched at his leg and the way his master slapped at his thigh.

Feynriel imagined himself making his excuses and leaving, the long bath he’d take after and the short nap, and whatever he’d find while he was dreaming. Hawke was close by, and need itself came with him; summer was all about gossip, parties, whispers, sleeping and resting and sweating, so often that they forgot what need was.

Connor started to stand because Feynriel wouldn’t sit; his master thumped his own chest and cleared his throat. ‘Both of you are making me nervous,’ he said. ‘Stop bobbing, make yourselves comfortable. That’s a master’s order, not a suggestion.’ He winked. Feynriel contemplated hating it, then told himself it was inconsequential, though that made it no less annoying. ‘Might as well stand,’ Connor’s master continued, ‘and clean up a little. We’ve got a guest tonight—fascinating stranger I met while I was out. I struck up a conversation about elephants with him; _far_ more interesting than the chit-chat you usually get, who’s hired who and who poisoned whomever and what color silk’s coming in from Perivantium these days. Everyone sweats through it in the end, save for the elves.’

‘Elephants,’ Feynriel said, the word sticking in his throat like grains of trail dust.

Connor caught his eye. His mouth was smiling but the expression was half-formed, the same as a lump of gray clay fished from the Minanter River, mud that hadn’t yet found its way to a kiln. He didn’t seem to know whether they were sharing a conspiratorial moment or if Feynriel was being _Dalish_ again, laughing at him from behind pursed lips or the back of his slim palm.

‘The wisest beasts in all of Thedas,’ Connor’s master said. ‘And if they aren’t that, then they’re certainly the largest.’

‘I like their trunks,’ Connor said, standing at last. He smoothed out his robes, but even his large hands couldn’t banish the wrinkles in his outfit, long creases marring the drape and sway of the garment. Connor had a way of making old things look lived in rather than worn out, companionable instead of undesirable. Feynriel remembered the vines flowering through the skull, the flushed budding petals spread dewy pink on dry white, and imagined the tender green shoots winding around Connor’s hairy calves, thin tendrils crawling beneath his skirts. ‘Just imagine what you could do with a nose that long.’

Feynriel blinked, and the illusion faded. Connor’s sandals were planted firmly on the ground, and there were no growing things reaching and climbing, thorns and blossoms to accessorize the simple cotton.

‘Imagine running me a bath, and then informing the kitchen slaves we’ll be three more for dinner,’ Connor’s master suggested. He waved a lazy hand in Connor’s direction, and Feynriel beyond him, fingertips glistening with olive oil as he dismissed them from the room. ‘Then you can imagine yourself into a good book tonight. Just because the heat’s eased off doesn’t mean your studies will.’

Connor rolled his eyes, chuffing his chin with the knuckles of his left hand. The skin there was chapped and red, as if he’d spent his last few weeks as a deck-swabber on a slaving vessel instead of a magister’s apprentice riding the Imperial Highway on a fine Orlesian warhorse.

‘ _Three_ more,’ Feynriel repeated. He could feel it when his heart slipped from its meditational rhythm, pulse agitated by the preparations—and perhaps the chaos—of a home that wasn’t his. _Never waste a word on repetition,_ his master always counseled, because words were breath, and a magister could never regain what he’d expelled and expended.

But Connor’s master didn’t seem to be the sort of man to trouble himself with such notions—and Connor was pretending to yawn, making it obvious he’d grown out of the habit of questioning his master’s eccentric pronouncements.

‘My fascinating guest has a fascinating friend.’ Connor’s master popped a slick, purple olive into his mouth. He sucked the flesh clean of the pit, then spat it straight into the blooming eye of the old bronto skull. ‘And I assume my apprentice’s equally fascinating friend will be staying…’ His sharp eyes slid from Feynriel to Connor, a predator marking the lay of his hunting grounds. ‘Unless our hospitality isn’t to his liking, of course.’

‘Come on,’ Connor said, turning on his heel. He had to reach to sling an arm around Feynriel’s shoulders, but he managed it without looking like a puppet whose strings had been jerked out of time. He steered Feynriel from the room under the steady warmth of his arm, the heat of his chest. Feynriel didn’t mind it, the sweat or the damp clutch of his grape-scented fingers, and ignored his impulse to shrug Connor loose the moment they were free of the garden. ‘He’ll never stop when he’s in a mood like this. You can take that bath you wanted, and I’ll send one of the slaves to fetch you fresh robes.’

‘I shouldn’t really,’ Feynriel reminded him, the long hallways wide and fresh-aired, the tiles patterned like the lyrium scorings in a buried thaig, bright blue on black, catching sunlight and sparkling.

‘Don’t be dull.’ Connor drew them past another set of interlocking porticos, through the garden and all the way to the baths, steam to flush the skin and clear the head and open the heart—to clean the body, too, which Feynriel preferred over the rest.

In the alienage, they bathed in bracken buckets, a smell that curled the sharpest of ears. But they accepted it because they had no other choice, no pale stream with minnows flashing silver, no open trees of the Arlathan or any other far-off forest. They splashed brown water wherever they could, lit their candles by the _vhenadahl_ , and remembered foliage they’d never seen, dirt somehow cleaner than the brown boards beneath their bare feet or the smog that belched from the sewers below.

‘You have a look on your face,’ Connor said, ‘right now that’s _very_ unpleasant. Is it because I called you boring? Don’t sulk.’

‘It isn’t that,’ Feynriel replied, memory and mistake and momentary diversion set aside—beginning to sweat, if faintly, himself.

Even bent over the hardest tasks, lost in the dreaming, his master was dry as bronto bone, the metal coverings on his ears warming, his pace quickened, no sign of sweat against his pale brow. Feynriel brushed the hair out of his eyes, and the small movement was enough for Connor to relinquish his hold, arms by his side again instead of one slung heavy across Feynriel’s shoulders. He watched as Feynriel tucked the stray hair back into the braid, fingers curling against his palm, then looked away and back down the hall, through the shadows cast by so many tall columns.

‘Don’t feel trapped,’ Connor said. ‘It’s not like I did this on purpose, you know. It just happened. You’ll have fun.’

‘Won’t I?’ Feynriel told him, the question meant to have no answer, and Connor gave him a gentle shove toward the door, both hands flat against his shoulder-blades.

*

Connor sent for clean robes, and Feynriel didn’t remark that the set that arrived was the one Connor had laughed at when he first saw Feynriel wearing it. When he’d told Feynriel they made him look like an Orlesian noblewoman and Feynriel asked how many Orlesian noblewomen he’d actually known, he’d replied, ‘Quite a few, actually—for example, my mother.’

Another warning, another sign. Asking questions to which you didn’t already know the answer or predict the outcome was dangerous enough—just like accepting an invitation you hadn’t intended to receive—and there were other, better, cleverer ways to learn, questions not asked and still answered, invitations curried instead of requested.

But there was no alternative to attending the little party that evening; the obligation was more imperative than the curiosity.

Feynriel sank below the water, against the hot stones, hair everywhere above him, and closed his eyes. There was no sound at all, not even his own breathing or his own heartbeat in his ears—water replaced the rest, and only the motions of his arms kept that water from being deathly silent. When he came up for air there were droplets on his lashes that he blinked away, opening his eyes to a clean body and a calmed mood. He was determined to be more polite after he dried his hair and braided it and dressed himself, employing the same etiquette his master showed all fellow magisters—especially the archons who outranked him in title and holdings, the keenest of smiles reserved for the least appreciated of conversationalists.

Feynriel could hardly remember a time when he hadn’t realized the ruse. There must have been one, a first surprise, a question he wanted to ask, why his master was most pleasant to those he felt least fondly toward, but it was so long ago now that the discovery was less important than its effects: who Feynriel was because he knew it, the same as magic, the same as breathing.

The towels were unscented, just clean, in a wide straw basket left against the damp rocks. Feynriel squeezed his hair out, dripping wet into the space between his bare feet, no more sand gritty between his toes. His robes were waiting for him, and he dressed, his boots brushed by some unseen slave and standing in parallel just outside the baths.

‘Oh, it’s _those_ ,’ Connor said, waiting for him in the guest study. He made no further comment while Feynriel combed his hair in the bedroom; the door between them was open, and Feynriel could see Connor lounging on a low couch, feet up, book against his knees. He was still wearing his sandals, the slim leather soles pressed against the tassled scroll-arm of the couch. He’d looked up when Feynriel passed through. He’d been waiting for him, or waiting for the distraction. ‘You’ll have to hope our guests like Orlesians.’

‘And not _just_ elephants,’ Feynriel agreed.

The response might have been too quiet for Connor too hear; the way he closed his book wasn’t too quiet for Feynriel, or the prowl of his footfalls, the slap of his sandals against the tiles as he came to lean in the doorway. He ruffled his hair, brushing it back off his brow with a flick of one thumb, the book abandoned in the other room.

‘Was that a joke?’ he asked. ‘You should do that more often. Do you…need help with all that hair?’

Feynriel replied with only a look, fingers even swifter than Connor’s when he was reaching out for a bud or a branch, twisting the plaits into place with the same unflinching determination as his mother.

She used to roll it into a bun at the back of her head, then started on Feynriel’s, sitting at the foot of the bed they shared, while Feynriel complained that she was tugging too hard and it _hurt_.

He’d never thought a tight braid was all that he had to feel, the sharp, fleeting pain that bothered him so much when he was a boy. He liked to think it was what it represented, other deeper hurts and more lasting fears, but maybe it was just as simple as having a sensitive scalp.

‘Fine,’ Connor said, as Feynriel tied off the end with a bit of gilded cord. ‘I suppose that answers _that_ question.’

Feynriel smiled, a wickedness that Connor appreciated if only because it surprised him. ‘I’d ask how I look, but I already know the answer.’

‘Orlesian noblewomen _are_ known to be sensitive about their appearances,’ Connor agreed. ‘You look—’

The door opened; in it stood an elvhen slave, who no more met Feynriel’s eyes than any of the young ones his age in the alienage.

‘The master’s guests have arrived,’ she murmured, gaze cast toward the floor, at their shoes before it traveled to her bare feet. ‘He bids you join him the antechamber, once you’re ready.’

Connor looked down, taking stock of his own appearance for once, as though he’d only just remembered there was someone besides Feynriel to pay attention to. His master’s insouciance might have been affected, but Connor seemed to honestly forget he had a body at times, taking little care to tend to it beyond the most basic aspects of dressing and trimming the thin fuzz of his beard—or not trimming it, these days, in an effort to encourage its continued growth.

Feynriel wondered again whether it had something to do with his upbringing—an Orlesian mother who fussed and prodded him into the finest silks, velveteen doublets with slashed sleeves, buckled shoes that stuck in Fereldan mud. It had nothing to do with dreaming when he pictured her wiping Connor’s cheek with a monogrammed handkerchief and tutting at him in smoky vowels.

The image made him smile, and he hid the curve of his lips behind the cool press of his own knuckles.

Someone had steamed the wrinkles from Connor’s afternoon robes, and he’d traded his gold belt for a red sash, tied simply at the waist. The swath of scarlet looked like an open wound against the softer cream tones; it reminded Feynriel of the tales Hahren Paivel had told around the campfire about werewolves and halla, that lonely summer on Sundermount when he’d still believed the Dalish were the answer to all his problems.

More elves that refused to look at him; more silence when he breathed too loudly and reminded everyone he was there. More soft whispers, and more bare feet, the shift of the cool winds from the Wounded Coast through the leaves, the spitting of the fire as flames hit each hidden pocket of sap.

They weren’t his people. They were _the people_ , and Feynriel was grateful for the lesson more than anything else, not the rash he contracted from some plant-life he was—apparently—allergic to.

 _What elves get rashes?_ Connor would ask.

What elves, indeed.

‘We’re ready,’ Connor said, as Feynriel drew the length of his braid over his shoulder, swinging as low as his waist. Connor yanked it the same as always, reaching out and giving it a tasseled tug. ‘Lead the way.’

The slave bowed so low that Feynriel was afraid she’d topple over; when she straightened, her eyes flicked over Connor where he stood, apparently liking what she saw enough to break with convention and appreciate him. Feynriel didn’t know how to feel about that, if he should feel anything—but his master had taught him to note and observe whatever he saw, regardless of his involvement, and Feynriel’s instincts for observation had always been keen.

That was his position. He had the right perspective for it.

It was no more fortunate than unfortunate that he thought of opportunity at a time like this—that he could look at this as a chance to gain information on one of his master’s fellow magisters, reporting back with anything interesting he discovered in the summer estate, west of Feynriel’s master’s villa, upwind rather than down.

The halls were lined with tapestries and fading daguerreotypes, an art collection gathered during the master’s travels, cast-offs from the holdings in Minrathous. Here was an Orlesian war relief, with peeling gilt paint and warm, dusky colors beneath, and there was an ink and paper print from the Anderfels, the vellum pale as ivory, spidery brushwork etching out the unforgiving landscape of its ragged mountain peaks. There were round-faced noblewomen and generals with aquiline noses, their helmets adorned with slim feathers and medals pinned to their chests; and there was no common thread to tie the pieces together like a sash at the waist or a bit of gilding at the tip of a braid, nothing to give an outside observer any insight into the eccentricities of the man who’d accrued so much, and chose to display everything.

Feynriel sniffed, keeping his hands at his sides as they followed the servant’s silent paces. Connor paused to linger in front of a mounted display, glossy dragon scales in different shapes and sizes, some as tiny as Feynriel’s pinky nail and some broader than the width of Connor’s palm; each was a different color, glittering like wicked black eyes under the torchlight, and some green, and some burnt red. The smallest was blue, the pale shade of Feynriel’s winter robes, which Connor said made him look like an icicle.

‘Impressive,’ Feynriel said, in a tone that meant he found it anything but.

‘It’s a _dragon_ ,’ Connor replied. ‘These are _real scales_.’

‘There were shambling corpses by Sundermount. In the night, we heard Revenant armor clanking, wind whistling through the metal.’ Feynriel watched as Connor’s hands lingered, spanning the shape and distance from one scale-edge to the next. ‘There was a Varterral in the caves, and Kirkwall was never—’

‘I know.’ Connor’s hands stilled. ‘Ferelden _was never_ , too. And there’ve been demons in our dreams—which means we’ve seen it all, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Feynriel said. ‘Including elephants.’

Laughter echoed from the antechamber before Connor could respond, a rich, rolling sound prickling warmth over Feynriel’s skin. He stepped closer to the commotion, Connor and his dragons forgotten, alongside the whisper of their robes when they brushed against one another, cotton on silk, too close in the corridor.

‘Try and _pretend_ that we’re friends,’ Connor said instead, turning his hand so his thumb rubbed against the delicate brocade at Feynriel’s sleeve. ‘You could even imagine you like spending time with me, if that isn’t too much to ask.’

Feynriel took his arm at the elbow, looping fabric through fabric, muscle through muscle. ‘Friends? In the Imperium? _Never._ ’

Connor’s cheeks were red again, or red still, from the sunburn he’d nurse until the skin browned and peeled, a few freckles beneath, just faint enough to be seen. He nudged Feynriel in the side, and their paces were uneven, Feynriel’s legs too long and Connor’s steps too quick, for them to arrive properly in the dining room together, in tandem.

The table was long and low and already set, sweet treats in dazzling array, the sort of food Feynriel’s mother would never eat—the sort she’d never like, besides, accepting stale biscuits with relish to prove a point, sipping pale broth with barely any flavor in it to fill her belly. Feynriel’s didn’t twist, not the way it used to from the smells that wafted from the Hanged Man as he passed by in the night—even warm ale would have been something better to wash those biscuits down than stale, rusted water, but they ate better than others, and he knew what it was to want more but not to be starving.

His father sent money now and then, a bare few coins. What they turned into had seemed magic once, before Feynriel knew what true magic was—and before he knew more about Vincento the merchant.

There were paper lanterns beyond the table, open evening beyond the lanterns, curtains draped between the columns in true Marnus Pell fashion. Perhaps Feynriel had forgotten where they were—the profiles of old generals from other countries lined like a private army in the halls, relics from pasts and peoples Feynriel knew only by what they left behind—but the wisteria was sweet in the garden, and it all came rushing back to him: Connor’s master, Marnus Pell, present rather than past, focus itself, Connor’s arm in his still and squeezing it tight.

Connor’s master was standing. His collar was open the same way Connor’s was open, an obvious detail that made Connor fuss with the buttons, and Feynriel would have made note of it, would have touched one of them with his fingers in a way that suggested he knew everything, if Hawke hadn’t been standing there, too—furred pauldrons still dusty, hair darker than it was in the fade, with a narrow streak of gray at one temple, a staff Feynriel didn’t recognize resting against his empty chair, a glass, likely of agreggio, held in his hands.

Hawke turned; Feynriel stopped. Connor’s sandal slapped the tiles.

‘Hawke,’ Feynriel said.

‘Feynriel,’ Hawke replied.

‘…Hawke?’ Connor asked.

‘And Feynriel,’ Connor’s master added.

Accident, chance; luck and fate. Feynriel took a step forward, away from Connor’s side, dropping Connor’s arm. Connor took a step after him, but they’d never been in time before and they were less so now, and Connor’s legs weren’t nearly as long as he wanted them to be.

These things happened in the Imperium. _If there’s one thing you can trust,_ Feynriel’s master had said, _it’s that the Imperial Highway is long._ But there were other things to trust, other needs felt, Hawke in Marnus Pell just as he promised in a dream. He lifted his glass and opened his arms wide, a gesture of greeting, wrinkles half-smiling at the corners of his eyes.

He wasn’t a vision.

Feynriel sometimes had difficulty trusting what he saw before him in the daylight hours, bright time spent walking and waking. He knew that. He knew he had even more difficulty trusting what he saw elsewhere, in those other spaces and places, and difficulty was better than ease, because difficulty trained while ease let things rot. Difficulty meant vigilance, and cleverness, and caution, and Feynriel didn’t cross the full distance despite himself, because of all those difficulties he’d known in the past.

Connor’s master was watching. Connor was, too, and Hawke. There was a fifth person in the room, another familiar face not even half-smiling, but half-sitting: Hawke’s friend whom Feynriel also knew, but only as a collection of rumors, gossip itself the same as artifacts from the Anderfels or tales from Kal-Sharok. There were slaves, whom Feynriel never forgot despite the knowledge that everyone else did, that often they forgot themselves, and the dust in Hawke’s pauldrons and the wine in his hands and the wrinkles in his eyes were tired details—more so now that they were no longer in the Fade, with all such clues smoothed away by the Fade-mists.

‘Champion of Kirkwall,’ Connor’s master said. He’d known all along. ‘Killed the Arishok in single combat—did I forget to mention that earlier?’

‘I know I always do,’ Hawke admitted, chuckling into his glass. He must have used the stories to barter safe passage, or to sweet-talk himself into fine homes, to find Feynriel in the waking world, less easy than elsewhere.

The Fade had demons. The rest of Thedas had everything else.

Hawke’s friend kept almost-sitting, then standing again, with feathers at his shoulders instead of fur. It was another awkward detail, all part of the tension in the room, and Feynriel felt the beginning of an old headache pulse in his temple, beneath the fall of his hair.

‘Reacting to surprises is something we try to teach the young mages here in Tevinter,’ Connor’s master continued. ‘Whether or not they learn makes more difference to them in the long run. Think fast.’

He tossed a porcelain bowl in Connor’s direction without further warning; his words had been warning enough. The wind picked up from the garden, sudden and salty and not without its fair share of sand; the porcelain shattered against the arcane made solid, one of Connor’s spell-shields standing between them and the minor assault, broken bits of bowl skittering along the floor.

‘You’re right,’ Hawke said, kicking one away from his foot. ‘Tevinter parties are _so_ much more interesting than parties anywhere else. Do we all get to break bowls, or is it just the master of the house? I wouldn’t want to step on any toes, you see.’

‘Break all the bowls you’d like,’ Connor’s master said, while heat crept up Connor’s throat; he rubbed at it, stepping around the mess and the slave who’d scurried in to clean it. That brought him farther from Feynriel, closer to Hawke, his master nodding in appreciation. ‘Just—throw them at the shorter one. He’s mine. Wouldn’t want to start an incident with the other; you never know what a magister’s going to take offense to.’

‘I’m sure Feynriel wouldn’t mind,’ Hawke said. ‘We go way back. It’s not the worst I’ve done to him, either—is it, Feynriel?’

‘Hawke’s dwarf once tried to get me killed,’ Feynriel explained.

‘You never told me about that,’ Connor said.

Hawke coughed. ‘It’s a sensitive memory.’

‘For me more than you,’ Feynriel said, aware he was being petulant and unable to do anything about it.

‘Troublesome business with a few slavers.’ Hawke swirled the wine in his glass, stirring up the dregs of spices and tannins, sparing a glance for Connor. ‘Funny how you ended up in the Imperium anyway, after all the trouble I took to keep you out of it. _Ha ha._ ’

‘Sometimes we end up in the same place, no matter what actions we take,’ Hawke’s friend said. He had blond whiskers, more kempt than Connor’s, with a sad mouth and languid eyes. He clutched his wine glass between his fingers like a staff, as if he was better used to wielding weapons than he was to fancy parties in a magister’s summer estate, or even drinking when he was thirsty, or even feeling thirsty at all.

He’d been the one to counsel Hawke against sending Feynriel to the Circle, and of Hawke’s companions he’d been the only one to do so. For that, Feynriel would always remember him with a measure of kindness, though there had never been any true understanding behind it—no deeper knowledge of why anyone would venture to step in on behalf of a half-blooded whelp.

Feynriel didn’t recall the man’s name. Hawke was the center of his tales, but so far from the center of Tevinter that each legend distorted itself over the distance. It was possible he might have been Anders— _the Anders_ —but quick assumptions were always more dangerous than bad questions.

The Imperium cared more for battles with qunari than the foibles and follies of other mages elsewhere, for example. Feynriel was lucky they’d taken him in as they did, with respect for the vessel because of its power, the body because of its magic, the opportunity rather than the halfling lad.

Something tweaked the end of his braid, and Feynriel looked toward Connor with rebuke, before realizing they were his own fingers, twined around the gilt tie in an old gesture of nerves. It was a habit of which his master had long since broken him, banishing not the anxieties themselves, but the ways in which they made themselves manifest.

 _It isn’t fear that tests the mettle of a mage, but whether or not he chooses to approach fear._ Feynriel drew in a deep breath, a part of his daily meditation rituals. If he focused his thoughts around a single point of concentration, he could almost smell the thick, dry scent of his master’s sandalwood incense, burning in the swinging censers.

‘Anders, you’ve gone and killed the conversation again,’ Hawke said. He buried his crooked nose in his glass, drinking deeply.

Feynriel wondered when he’d arrived, how long he’d been here, and in how many other homes he’d drunk sweet summer wine before crossing this threshold—the right one, if only by accident. They were all made of dreams and doorways, and determination, dust in uncomfortable places.

‘Normally that’s Feynriel’s purview.’ Connor shrugged in Feynriel’s direction, small enough that it might just have been a twitch, salty breezes tickling him between the shoulder-blades or a prickle of sweat making itself known against the skin. ‘Honestly, I think he’d be happier if no one had to talk at all. We could all just sit and stare at one another and read minds. Wouldn’t that be cozy?’

Hawke threw his head back and laughed, too long and a little too loud. Feynriel stared at the short, dark hairs lining his tanned throat, noting the pale scar that ran alongside his neck, hooking below his steel gorget.

‘Anders,’ Connor’s master said. ‘Now _there’s_ a familiar name.’

‘Been to the Anderfels lately?’ Anders asked. ‘There are a lot of them there.’

Feynriel believed his instinct at last, just rumors and humor, the Gallows he might have still been trapped within no more than blasted rock on foreign soil beside an uncalm sea. He didn’t have to press any sharp blade to his palm, to spill blood and slip through skulls to know it.

Hawke’s friends always had been dangerous—or so Feynriel suspected from the whispers of their dreams, when they invaded his and left pieces of themselves behind.

If he could read minds, he’d have done it already, because one hundred times was just as much of a trespass as one. He’d know where Hawke’s scar had come from, and if there were any others, and why Connor sometimes laughed in the middle of a quiet room, with no company but the yellowing pages of a dusty tome, no sound but his foot tapping against the top of Feynriel’s boot; he’d know why Hawke had asked him here, and whether Connor’s master was really an idiot or a clever bastard or neither or both, and he’d know the reason for Anders’s downcast eyes. The power was there.

The Imperial Highway was long, but the path to temptation passed in the blink of an eye.

Connor had been taken by desire once, just as Feynriel had been taken by sloth. Neither was keen to repeat the other’s mistake—Feynriel even less keen to repeat his own.

Feynriel ran his finger over the stiff corner of his starched collar. He could feel Anders watching him, but he was the only one.

 _I need you_. Hawke’s words remained, but the need itself didn’t, covered by layers of dust and fur, steel-tipped plates of light armor, scars and hair and broken bone, laughter that missed its mark but hid others in the firing. There were too many people in the room, Hawke’s friend and Connor’s master, and as always, dreams were more complicated—which made them so much easier.

Feynriel would never be ready until both were one and the same. He twisted his hair around his fingers and tugged, then let it fall free of his touch, swinging by the small of his back instead.

‘Let’s eat,’ Connor’s master suggested, hands nowhere near any of the dinnerware. ‘I know how you Fereldans get when you haven’t been properly fed and watered. Dane and the Werewolf is more a cautionary tale than a great work of literature.’

‘Now that’s the one thing I haven’t fought.’ Hawke held a chair out for Anders, then took one of his own, legs crossed at the ankle, one arm slung crooked over the wooden back behind him, red tattoo in the shadow of his elbow. ‘Werewolves. Wouldn’t happen to know where I could find any of those, do you?’

‘I’m sure we could whip some up, if that’s what you’re hungry for,’ Connor’s master said. ‘We’re more purveyors of shades and skeletons, though—especially this far into the Imperium.’

‘Pity,’ Hawke replied, polishing a fig on the front of his jerkin. He offered it to Anders, but Anders shook his head, and Feynriel sat in the chair Connor hadn’t pulled out, across from Hawke, their boots bumping under the long table.

It was partly because of Feynriel’s long legs, partly because of Hawke’s long reach. His eyes met Feynriel’s over the table, over a roast bird glistening with sweet spices. Hawke’s gaze was as gold as summer wine, as rich as the polished copper of window-lamps and swinging censers.

But for all he watched too closely, Feynriel intercepted no secret message, no hint or clue from one old friend to another, no reminder of the cheerful words Hawke sent on paper—news of Kirkwall, which Feynriel didn’t appreciate, and news of the Dalish and his mother, which Feynriel saved despite himself. Instead, he saw only the quirk of Hawke’s mouth beneath his beard and the flash of his white teeth, and heard only the scrape of plates as they were moved, the shuffle of slave-robes and simple cotton and bare feet padding across cool tile as wine and water were served.

‘So…’ Connor touched the grapes in a bowl before him, something green pulsing through them before the color swelled and faded, ended by the snap of the stems as he took some for himself. He polished one round, small fruit on his chest, toying with it between restless fingers. ‘What…brings you to Marnus Pell, Champion Hawke?’

‘It’s a funny story, really,’ Hawke began. ‘And a long one. My throat gets so sore whenever I try to tell it—if only I had my trusty dwarf here, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to be the center of conversation, as always. But he’s off threatening other young mages,’ Hawke added, nodding toward Feynriel, ‘putting their lives in danger, helping them get out of it again, reaping all the reward when the dust settles… Never trust a dwarf who speaks more than he belches—if only I’d had such wise advice when I was younger, who knows how different _my_ life could have turned out.’

‘Sounds like a long story already,’ Connor replied.

‘Remarkable how I did that,’ Hawke said. ‘Oh, and did I mention there were pirates?’

‘Pirates?’ Connor leaned forward, using the same voice he reserved for talk of elephants—or dragons, or ogres, those enormous and improbable creatures of legend that still found corporeal form. Maybe it was a Fereldan thing, some other piece of easy bonding, a part of what they shared rather than what they didn’t. Hawke leaned forward too, while Connor’s master reclined, and Feynriel watched them eat, wiping the corners of their mouths with their thumbs when they were finished chewing. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

‘Element of surprise,’ Hawke said. ‘You know, _one_ of them didn’t even have pants.’

*

Most of the story was a lie—inasmuch as almost every story involved lying—but the lies were as important as the truth, or so Feynriel told himself. He did his best to pick each thread from the weave, to find where it began and where it ended, to understand the spaces left and the questions yet unanswered, the holes in the fabric of the tale beyond anecdote and incident and general indecency. They’d sailed from Kirkwall to Antiva, from Antiva to Rivain; there’d been merchant princes and spirit summonings and seers’ predictions, bonfires and blackpowder and sudden squalls.

From the way Hawke told it, Marnus Pell was inevitable, traveling ever further from Kirkwall, without once looking back. With Isabela in the rigging, he added, and the sunburn he was nursing after Llomerryn, where _else_ would he choose to look?

Connor laughed, and Hawke spoke the name Isabela reverently, and there was a moment when Anders almost chuckled, then coughed, his hands clasped so tightly between his knees that his knuckles were white, his nail-beds blue. Hawke glanced to him, and Anders glanced back.

It was the only true moment of the night, but it passed before Feynriel could recognize it, like one of the seaside breezes in Minrathous at the height of summer. For all the good it did, it might as well have never blown through at all, too brief to change anything, too subtle to penetrate the thick weather.

‘Feynriel never told me about Isabela,’ Connor said, leaning back. ‘You never told me about Isabela— Can you believe he never told me about Isabela?’

‘And don’t say you forgot her,’ Hawke added, hands against his stomach, fingers splayed wide open instead of balled together. ‘That would kill her once _and_ send her rolling in her watery grave. No one _forgets_ Isabela—it simply isn’t done.’

Feynriel hadn’t forgotten Isabela. He hadn’t forgotten the way she slid through the Fade-mists, either, her eyes brightly gleaming, or who appealed to her most—which of the demons she listened to, a choice that meant so much more than a lack of trousers or a dirty limerick or limbs tangled in salty rope.

‘And they say mages have it better in the Imperium,’ Connor’s master said. ‘All the pirates that stop here keep their knives _on_.’

‘ _And_ they all wear trousers.’ Connor sighed, gaze cast elsewhere—imagining the sun setting over a horizon of dark water, no doubt.

But there were demons out at sea, just as there were demons beneath the black spires, demons in the daylight hours and demons in the dark. The impulse to sail away was beneath them, and Connor burned easily, with a paler complexion than Hawke’s.

‘Now, don’t be sour,’ Hawke said. ‘You _do_ have elephants, and I never had one of those. I thought about it back in Kirkwall—trying to import—but then, where would I keep it? The house dwarves would’ve been testy. Just the dog was bad enough.’

‘Yes,’ Anders agreed. ‘It was.’

‘No elephants, Anders?’ Hawke asked.

‘Not if you let them up on the bed,’ Anders said, passing half a fig between his lips and chewing slowly.

Connor cleared his throat, satisfied by his own amusement, a bit of humor with no obvious punchline. His master tapped his plate with a piece of bone, not keeping time with the music. It was no nervous habit, but something with more purpose, perhaps a reminder that Connor was eating more quickly than his guests.

Only in Tevinter did they pile the plates high, then expect everyone at the table to avoid or disavow hunger, making small-talk over the bounty as if it wasn’t there.

There were meats on the platters, great spiced shanks that ran with blood and clear juices when the slaves carved them. Feynriel kept to the sorrel greens and fresh fruit, knowing Connor’s master would take note of it, and imagine he’d discovered something about Feynriel that truly mattered.

One had to be willing to sacrifice a few small privacies in order to avoid compromising anything more important, at times more obvious. Let the other magisters think they were getting away with something and they’d never have cause to pry deeper, beneath Feynriel’s thin smiles and the lack of color in his cheeks—that he drank water instead of wine, that his elvhen roots were betrayed by the broth he sipped and the steam on his face.

‘Have you _seen_ them yet?’ Connor rested his cheek in the palm of his hand. ‘The elephants. They’re more common than dragons, in these parts.’

Hawke’s brows disappeared beneath the fall of his dark hair, lips quirked into an expression that wasn’t quite a grin. ‘Fewer dragons in the Imperium? Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Anders, I think I’ve just planned out my retirement.’

There _had_ been dragons in Tevinter once, making their homes in the Hundred Pillars and terrorizing the Silent Plains. But they’d been routed one by one, hunted for their bones and their scales, their fire glands and their fire-streaked teeth, which were made into jewelry or ground into powder or carved into trinkets, sewn into robes and hewn into staffs. Feynriel’s master had an acquaintance who wore a dragon’s claw earring, the wicked black keratin winking in the sunlight as it swung low over his shoulder, and the cinch of his staff glittered with dragonscale, sleek black and red still warm to the touch.

Feynriel gripped his goblet of wine tighter at the stem, his fingertips cool where they pressed against the glass.

‘They prefer the colder climes, I believe,’ he said, casting his eyes toward the fine linen tablecloth and the intricate patterns of its overlay. Orlesian thread, spun as fine as spider’s silk and twined together in shades of blue and gold, with veins of heart’s purple running down the center.

It reminded Feynriel of a dreamer’s net, the same threads he cast and followed from one place to the next in the tangled rooms of the Fade.

Again, he was unable to banish his curiosity. Again, he was forced to wonder what Hawke wanted with him— _needed_ from him—that brought him so far north, with a pirate at the prow and her ship long from shore already.

‘Fire drawn to ice, is that it?’ Hawke gave the far wall such a burning look Feynriel wished he was a mosaic tile.

‘Not always,’ Connor replied.

‘Do you have accommodations for the rest of your stay?’ Connor’s master asked, interrupting the flow of conversation like a boulder rolled into the middle of a stream. ‘Marnus Pell might not be the excitement a man of your stature and experience is expecting of Tevinter, but I think _we’d_ be capable of rustling up a few beds—minus the elephants for your companion, here.’

‘You _could_ stay with us,’ Connor added. Feynriel saw him mimic his master, however unconsciously, by leaning forward in his seat. ‘No elephants in the morning unless you ask for them, and the grounds go on for miles. You get used to the beaches—sand instead of mud, that sort of thing.’

‘Ferelden.’ Hawke sighed. ‘How I miss it.’

‘I don’t,’ Anders said.

‘We could have mud imported.’ Connor’s master stroked his chin, a larger version of the same tug and rub Connor routinely displayed. ‘Just water and dirt—how hard can it be?’

‘When I asked,’ Connor said, ‘he wasn’t _nearly_ so accommodating.’

Beneath the table, Hawke again bumped Feynriel’s boot with his. It might have been an accident, only there were never accidents in Tevinter. Hawke didn’t appear in the neighboring villa by accident, either; he wasn’t at Marnus Pell because of casual winds tossing ships this way and that on a careless sea.

Feynriel swallowed a thin slice of apple that had been braised in lemon juice. ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’

The glint in Hawke’s eyes might have been a trick of the light, vanishing as he lifted his wine goblet to take a liberal swallow. But Feynriel felt warmed by it all the same, and he knew he’d stepped in to do the right thing, shaping accident with the same grace as fate, making it more than luck, more than chance. His materials were all as flimsy and volatile as Fade-mist; they were no artists, working with stone or even clay, but something no more or less transparent than a cloud, or the roll of smoke from an ill-kept hearth.

Finding form in the unshaped air was more difficult a task than herding kittens, and some made it their life’s work.

Feynriel pinched his napkin between his thumb and forefinger, little crescents of lemon juice damp against the fabric. ‘This is just the chance,’ he explained, while Connor looked sour and Connor’s master looked somewhere else, ‘to show Hawke my gratitude for all he’s done for me. You would do me and my master great honor if you allowed our hospitality while in Marnus Pell, Hawke.’

‘No elephants in the bedroom where he’s staying,’ Connor’s master warned. ‘It’s all protocol and propriety, and not enough pillows.’

‘Gratitude.’ Hawke coughed lightly. ‘It’s a serious thing—so I’m told. There are too many people in the Free Marches alone I never got the chance to thank properly for saving _my_ life—not that many have, of course, since it’s usually the other way around, but I can only imagine the _burdens_ I’ve left behind. Pillows or no.’

Anders cleared his throat after that. Hawke stretched, bumping one furred shoulder against one feathered one.

‘Surely you understand,’ Hawke continued, with a friendly glance their current host’s way.

‘Implicitly,’ Connor’s master replied.

‘Don’t you just love it when that happens?’ Hawke clasped his hands together with a sudden clap of hollowed palm on hollowed palm, and one of the newer slaves stepped forward thinking it was a command; Hawke made such a fuss about his embarrassment—‘You know, I think I’ve been spoiled rotten by servants who don’t do much serving, or bar wenches who spill someone else’s drinks in your lap and laugh in your face afterward; really, there’s _nowhere_ like the Imperium!’—that the slave escaped back into the kitchens without further reprimand, narrowly escaping public punishment, at least for the rest of the night. The others made no such mistakes, and Hawke made no more in the same vein, and the drinks flowed, and Hawke ate as though he was starving, as though he didn’t care who knew about his hunger, or his enjoyment, or his tendencies to indulge.

He hadn’t been in the Imperium for long. He didn’t understand the way of it. He was no magister, though his staff rested against a nearby column, close enough that he might grab it should there be any trouble—less likely a herd of stampeding elephants than a personal enemy of Connor’s master come to pay a night-time visit, to start the season off in the manner to which so many were accustomed: with something less dull to talk about.

Revenge and gratitude. Cool broth in shallow bowls. Connor and Hawke outdid each other in lambling legs licked clean to the bone, as though both of them were the same age, both of them still growing, despite the fullness of Hawke’s beard and the gray at his temple.

Flute-girls played their flute-songs in the garden. The sun set slowly, but soon enough it was dark, as always. Feynriel sent a courier to his master to warn him of the honor and the imposition—always both at the same time—murmuring simple instructions in the lad’s ear, and when he turned back to the table and the conversation they were just as he’d left them, without requiring constant tending like a garden full of unruly vines.

*

They still had no way of discussing things in private. Connor’s master was determined to keep them forever, at least until dawn’s first light, while Connor was determined to ask so many questions, and Feynriel was full long before dessert was brought, sweet yogurts and honeys and dotted fruit bleeding into the white curds.

Now and then Anders twitched before he was still again, fingers fisted on the backs of his thighs. Hawke never turned to him, and all Feynriel could determine from that was that theirs was a curious friendship.

When Connor bumped Feynriel’s shoulder with one of his own, he didn’t bump back, while everyone laughed politely at all the Fereldan jokes.

‘Did you hear the one about the Bann from West Hill?’ Hawke asked.

‘Careful,’ Connor replied. ‘My uncle’s a Bann.’

Hawke chuckled low into his empty glass ‘Yes, but Bann _rhymes_ with so much more than Arl or Teyrn. It’s nothing _personal_.’

Feynriel smoothed his thumb over the tassel on his belt-cord, less smooth and more tactile than the tassel of his braid. One of Anders’s boots scuffed along the tile with a mousy squeak, and Hawke chuckled again, but let it spread into a yawn. ‘Feynriel,’ he said, ‘I’m terribly sorry to inform you that I’m getting old, and my stamina just isn’t what it used to be. Good thing I’m not still living in Kirkwall—do you have any idea how late _those_ parties used to last? And with the most boring company, too… Never mind; I’ve used myself up, and now I’m the sort of man who goes to bed _before_ he sees the sun rise again. Tragic, isn’t it?’

‘One of the most pervasive tragedies of Thedas,’ Connor’s master agreed. ‘A fate worse than slavery, I’d imagine.’

‘Slavery of a sort,’ Hawke said. ‘Slave to the whims and mercies of your own aching body, that is. I always thought ocean air would do a man some good, but all that salt just made me feel even older than I am. And somewhere out there, right this moment, is a bed with my name on it.’

‘Of course.’ Feynriel stood with the customary swish of silks and a tepid bow. ‘Your hospitality tonight—’

Connor’s master waved a lazy hand, swatting at a fat green moth in the process. ‘Yes, yes. I know all the lines. If I wanted to be an apprentice again I’d dress up in the old robes and haul out the old tomes. We were only too glad to have you. Give your _warmest_ regards to your master, will you? Ask him how that scar’s doing these days, what with the shift in the weather.’

‘Tevinter repartee.’ Hawke shook his head, cupping his beard with his thumb and forefinger rather than rubbing it. ‘ _Delightful_. I’d often wondered—and now I find it’s _just_ as catty as gossip in the Hanged Man, or barbs exchanged amongst pirates.’

‘You would have done well here,’ Connor’s master said. ‘And so few manage it.’

Anders stood, action marked by a creak as his chair slid back along the floor. ‘Hawke does well anywhere. It’s one of his few redeeming qualities.’

‘You mean it’s the only reason no one’s seen fit to knife me in the back and leave me for dead,’ Hawke said. When he stood, it wasn’t his chair that creaked, but rather his knee, an old joint popping when the sore leg straightened.

Feynriel felt nothing for the hurt itself—he had no instinctive flush of magic at his fingertips to mend the wound—but he felt something for the man beneath the ache, a tug of fresh sympathies coupled with old regrets, about the life he might have led as a normal mage fighting at Hawke’s side in Kirkwall instead of fighting dreams in the Imperium.

If only a man could be read the same as a map—with a table for scale to mark the distance he’d traveled and the years he’d lived. The people he’d known could be inked out as clearly as the borders between Antiva and the Imperium, the Free Marches beneath like a wide, green bowl, supporting its northern neighbors in its grasp. But people were never as easy to read as parchment, and Feynriel couldn’t run his hands over Hawke like vellum, fingers feeling out all his flaws, tracing scars between lines of poetry from Qarinus or magical theory from Vyrantium.

Feynriel’s skin was flushed from the wine he hadn’t drunk, and it was only his master’s training that kept him from stumbling as he made his way to the entry hall, where he’d passed with Connor hours before, in a different set of robes, sand gritty in his boots.

He could hear chatter in the distance, Connor’s master and Anders following as Hawke’s near-silent footfalls closed the space between them in the narrow corridor, unlit by torches even now that the hour was late. There were lanterns lining the garden path outside instead, great, colorful globes that seemed to make a mockery of other houses, with simple white lights that looked like stardust littering the open courtyard, little bowls holding littler candles.

In Marnus Pell, it was easier to see the stars—without the light from the coliseum to overpower them, or the spires of the Black Divine cutting across the sky. There’d been stars in Kirkwall, but the heavy smog of Lowtown blotted them out, close to the rooftops and unmoved by bilge-wrecked breezes.

Feynriel sometimes felt as though it was possible to drown in the endless constellations, the Milkmaid and the Serpent, the Sextant and the Archer; the sky was just like the Fade at times, just as endless, only there were no threads between each bright point of light for Feynriel to follow, and nothing for him to hold to when he tipped into the shadows between the stars.

Hawke’s hand landed warm against his shoulder, reminding him of where he was, if not who he was, beyond the whats he’d come to terms with and the hows he’d stretched and stretched to understand. Feynriel knew it was Hawke by the touch, the smell of his furs and the broken nail on his thumb, stained purple with a bruise beneath it.

Despite the warmth of the night, he felt gooseflesh rise on his skin, prickling against the drape of his light robes.

These moments were rare and warm not because of the night’s lingering heat, but because of something private, personal. Feynriel asked himself whether Hawke could feel it, whether the fabric of his robes was so thin as to betray him completely—but Hawke only squeezed Feynriel’s shoulder, tugging him close as they kept pace toward the door. Their footsteps marched in perfect rhythm, Hawke’s long legs beneath their straps and leathers, and Feynriel could smell the wine and meat on his breath, tickling the too-sharp curve of his human ear.

‘We’ll talk when I can get you alone,’ Hawke said, amusement coloring the warmth in his voice.

‘You said—’ Feynriel began, only his voice sounded like a child’s, and he recoiled at its sudden betrayal.

‘Thank you.’ Hawke tightened his grip, strong fingers on slim silk and hard bone. ‘More when we’re alone—now that’s something I haven’t said in years. Scandalous, isn’t it? When in Tevinter…’

‘I’ll speak with you later, then,’ Feynriel replied. ‘In private.’

For a moment, Hawke leaned his entire weight on Feynriel’s shoulders. He was a heavy man, with solid muscle and armor, no light elvhen bones, but Feynriel held beneath him—perhaps unexpectedly; or perhaps Hawke had expected that all along.

Feynriel touched his hand, patting the cracked knuckles with his palm, the sort of gesture that couldn’t be offered in the Fade. All that touched a man there were demons and desires, soft whispers and sudden spirits and the Fade-fires, though it was best not to stray too close to their flames.

Hawke’s hand was as warm as his breath. It smelled of the wood from his staff, which he held now in a different grip, and for different reasons.

Feynriel was no tool.

Then, there came a scuffle, a flutter of silk curtains, the slap of sandals against tile. ‘It smells like horse shit out here,’ Connor said, suddenly beside them, though not between them yet. ‘Phew! Doesn’t it bother you? I wonder if Dane got loose in the garden again. He loves to eat the apples.’

‘You know, Merrill was the exact same way,’ Hawke replied. He clapped Connor on the shoulder after that, but he didn’t shift the brunt of his weight. The memory of the heat from his touch lingered on Feynriel’s skin, against the pulse in his throat, tighter than any of the clasps on his highest of collars. ‘Though I’ll tell you this—we _were_ able to grow an unfair share of _delicious_ tomatoes. All the neighbors were so jealous.’

‘Are you on about those tomatoes again?’ Anders asked.

Feynriel glanced to him, then to Connor—because Anders was watching Hawke, but Connor was watching Feynriel. The lack of subtlety made a few of the shorter hairs on the back of Feynriel’s neck prickle, though he was already aware of each stray lock that fell from its careful plaiting.

Even sitting still, the most natural tendency for anyone—for anything—was to come loose again, no matter how tightly coiled, and without constant maintenance all things would unspool and unwind into the fray.

Connor lifted his brow, a look that reminded Feynriel of Hawke, only it wasn’t quite there yet. It had some of the humor, but none of the wisdom, just a quirk and a frown all rolled into one, unable to decide which it wanted to be, or if it should be anything.

‘Don’t be jealous,’ Feynriel told him. Connor had the decency to act horrified, then annoyed, then subdued, scuffing his sandal against the stone pathway, just on the threshold between house and front-garden. ‘I knew him from Kirkwall, after all. I’m sure you’ll get all the best gossip somehow, and you can show him the elephants whenever it pleases you.’

‘Oh,’ Connor said. ‘ _That._ Right. Of course. He’s staying with you. Have fun with him—with it, I mean. Have fun with _it_.’

‘That isn’t the point.’ Feynriel tucked yet another flyaway behind his ear. ‘He _did_ save my life. It’s the least I can do, all things considered.’

‘Heroes and champions,’ Connor said, stepping forward. When his foot hit the dirt bare toe first, all the growing things, the night blossoms and the dewy petals, keened toward him, a rustle in the foliage from more than just the coastal breeze. ‘Does that mean it’s a lucky thing _mine_ had the good sense to stay in Ferelden where he belonged? By the way—’

But his master’s hand fell over him before he could finish, coupled with the shadow cast by his master’s reach, a clasp to mimic Hawke’s touch only a few seconds before. Feynriel’s braid fell loose from his grip, and Connor’s expression also fell, focus shifting from Feynriel to Hawke, but finding Feynriel again after.

‘Remember to ask that question about the scars, mind,’ Connor’s master said, lifting his free hand in a wave. ‘And _try_ to let the good Champion of Kirkwall out once in a while, just to entertain the rest of us. You stop moving, Hawke, and you might as well be dead.’

‘I couldn’t keep him if I wanted to,’ Feynriel replied, enough to make a furrow appear above Connor’s nose, though his master’s eyes lit up at the idea, teeth bared in the unsteady light.

‘Another one of Thedas’s fine tragedies,’ he said, before Hawke gestured to Feynriel, and Feynriel followed—down the simple path, not straight at all, winding past the open gates and opening up into the street.

‘Tell me, Feynriel—are they all like that?’ Hawke asked.

‘They have ears everywhere,’ Feynriel replied.

‘…By which I meant handsome and _so_ well-traveled,’ Hawke amended. ‘And not the least bit devious, but I’ve been known to appreciate the quality every now and then.’

Anders’s lips twitched. Feynriel’s did the same. The joke didn’t make him a part of anything, no strong arm slung around both his shoulders, not leaning his head close to Hawke’s the way Connor did at one point, over a shared bowl of delicate pastry, their eyes crinkling in the corners as they laughed.

They weren’t alone yet, and Hawke’s footfalls were heavy now, not rogue-quiet as they crossed the street. The lamps set on wall-tops guided them along their way, the slaves in the atrium waiting to take their dusty cloaks, the soft music of falling water from the simple fountain beneath the open sky.

Hawke rested his hand flat against a stone column, tracing its polished side, catching his thumbnail on a time-scoured pockmark—one of the beautiful flaws, Feynriel’s master called it, of natural age. Hawke didn’t lean against the column, either, pushing off it when Feynriel introduced him to his master instead of the other way around, all charming smiles and the lingering scent of agreggio, the warmth of his touch trapped in the weave of Feynriel’s silk pauldron.

‘What a surprise,’ Feynriel’s master said, hands tucked into his sleeves.

‘No worries,’ Hawke replied. ‘I often find I surprise myself, so you see, it’s nothing personal.’

*

It was too late for baths to be run; the guest room was prepared and the curtains opened, incense lit to keep away the fat night-flies, the littler ones that made no noise at all but drew hungry blood.

The room had two beds, and Anders sat on the one farther from the door.

‘I’m going to have a tour,’ Hawke said.

‘It’s late,’ Anders replied.

‘I didn’t ask _you_ on the tour, did I?’ Hawke crossed the room, dropping his furred pauldrons on Anders’s bed, ruffling the feathers in Anders’s coat on purpose, though for whatever reason, Anders didn’t complain. ‘You know me—I always have to map out every possible exit. People are generally trying to kill me, you see.’

‘That’s not unwise,’ Feynriel said. ‘Especially in the Imperium.’

‘See?’ Hawke turned to Anders again, already by the door. ‘ _Feynriel_ agrees with me.’

‘Because _Feynriel’s_ not the one you’ll wake up when you come clomping back in at all hours of the night.’ Anders unclasped his pauldrons and set them on top of Hawke’s, the sheen of blue-black feathers settling over the soft, gray fur. Somehow, they looked like they belonged together that way, just the right balance of colors and textures. Feynriel turned away, scratching an itch on the narrow bridge of his nose. ‘Try not to keep him running up and down stairs all night—he might _act_ invincible, and he might _tell_ you the same, but he’s far from it.’

‘Worrywart,’ Hawke said.

‘Bad knee,’ Anders replied, leveling him with a gaze.

‘We’ll be quick,’ Feynriel promised, speaking against the sudden loneliness tickling the empty spaces between his rib-bones, the natural reaction to realizing he was the odd man out—a dreamer amidst the waking, or a mage in the land of shades, half-human amongst the Dalish and half-elf amongst everyone else.

Feynriel knew that feeling the same as he knew how to breathe in open air and hold his breath under-water, but it never grew easier, no matter how much time passed hand-in-hand with it. At least Hawke didn’t look at him the way the elves in the alienage had, and Anders’s gaze seemed nothing more accusatory than weary, without anything so personal as malice or even dislike. He bounced thoughtfully on the bed, then turned his gaze once more toward the others, Hawke still hovering in the doorway and Feynriel hovering beside him.

‘Just try to be quiet when you come back,’ Anders said.

‘It’s like you won’t even know I’m there,’ Hawke replied.

He turned on his heel, and Feynriel stepped over the threshold after him, like a sea bird caught in the wake of a passing ship.

It was dark in the corridor, darker still when Feynriel eased the heavy door shut behind him. He lit a globe of light in the center of his palm—more reliable than a torch, his master always said, and with none of that frivolous flickering—and held it aloft, taking care not to scorch Hawke’s shoulder.

‘Fancy trick,’ Hawke said, low tones touched with the color of appreciation, just as real outside the Fade as it was within. ‘But nothing beats a candle for that flattering light. The _romance_ of it all.’

‘This is simpler—and brighter.’ Feynriel spun it in his fingers like one of his master’s summoning spheres. He tried not to think about how much Hawke’s comment sounded akin to something Connor would say, and how his own response had been given in the same spirit.

 _Fereldans,_ he told himself, and tried to leave it at that, just as his master would, focused instead on the glimmering curve within the palm of his hand—accepting that, unlike a candle or even a handshake, it had no fire and no warmth.

They moved down the hall side by each, Hawke’s bare arm brushing Feynriel’s sleeve as they kept pace with one another, Hawke not used to being led and Feynriel not comfortable taking the lead. He caught sight of their reflection in one of his master’s diamond-paned mirrors, Hawke broad and dark, and himself a slim reed of silver in the gloom.

They made just as strange a pair in the Imperium as they had in the Fade, only here there were other people to interrupt and distract their time together, gossiping slaves and other mages, friends and rivals and enemies and companions.

And elephants, too, though Feynriel supposed he felt the others were larger, and interrupted more, with more pertinent noise.

‘Is there somewhere in particular I should begin?’ Feynriel asked. ‘Somewhere…less popular, for example?’

Knowing Hawke, he could trust that his question would be interpreted properly, or even interpreted at all. He didn’t much care whether they visited the baths or the starlight garden, the library or the kitchens, but if Hawke needed the reminder that they were alone, then Feynriel was the only one who could give it to him.

‘Bit of fresh air, maybe,’ Hawke said. ‘Moonlit walks are the same everywhere, aren’t they? The same moon—presumably the same air—although it smells better here than it ever did in Kirkwall. Even in Hightown, the scents… _rose_.’

‘This way,’ Feynriel said, gesture following words, direction following gesture.

Doors led to other doors, halls to other halls, breezes tangling around his ankles and stirring the heavy fall of hair on Hawke’s brow.

‘A man could get used to this.’ Hawke paused to wink appreciatively at a wall-mosaic, slave nudes that made Feynriel blush when he was younger and didn’t know they were nothing more than geometrical formulae, someone else’s desires and not his own. ‘What’s the price again? Blood magic? Boring social engagements? I can never decide which one is worse—and you can get both everywhere, you know, not _just_ in the Imperium.’

The sound of Hawke’s voice filled the empty hallway, too obvious against the listening walls. Feynriel stepped out between two tall columns, away from that sound, into the garden that was otherwise silent.

Unlike Hightown, Feynriel’s master’s grounds smelled of fresh blossoms, dew-filled petals that unfurled only in the night-time hours. He and Hawke walked the simple path together, Hawke clearing his throat now and then, Feynriel moving from lamp to lamp, while the globe eased into something no larger than a rough-cut opal in the center of his palm, burnished between his life-lines.

He didn’t need it anymore, but it was still his, and he kept it against the dark.

‘Ah,’ Hawke said, and, ‘ahem,’ and ‘hm,’ tucking one slim white flower-head against his fingers, brushing the leaf gently, even bending over to sniff it.

It might have been better to meet in the Fade—somewhere safer, where the only ears that listened were the ones that heard desire, not gossip, a different currency of secrets than what the magisters mimicked under the open sky. It had its own set of dangers, but also urgency, and Hawke’s sudden interest in botany was the opposite of urgent.

‘…Moonflowers,’ Feynriel told him, unsure of what else to say. Connor had made them all bloom once, the pursed lips of their petals uncurling too quickly, with just a single gesture of his hand. It was another party trick, Feynriel had informed him at the time, and by contrast, Hawke settled for a simple touch, observing just one in the fall of dark foliage rather than hundreds.

‘How prosaic,’ Hawke replied. His thumb was nothing more than a shadow against the pale, supple flute of the flower-head, long and closed instead of open and wide, before he drew away, and drew Feynriel closer. ‘The flowers don’t have ears too, do they, Feynriel?’

‘They might.’ Feynriel’s globe flickered out in favor of another protection—there were spells for what they needed, not light to guide them but shields to mute their words. The arcane walls glittered through the bowers, and Hawke chuckled.

‘They wouldn’t teach you _that_ in the Gallows,’ he said. ‘Obviously not _now_ , since everyone’s so busy with the rubble where the _Chantry_ used to be, but I meant it more…generally.’

‘Very impressive,’ Feynriel admitted. ‘I never knew when I met you that you’d go on to do so many… _things_.’

‘I could say the same for you,’ Hawke said. ‘Moonflowers and elephants and summer pavilions—Feynriel, I had no idea you were so enterprising.’

‘It’s hardly arishoks and revolutions, is it?’ Feynriel asked.

‘Arishok, actually.’ Hawke cupped his beard in the palm of his hand again, as though he felt it wanted trimming, or as though he still didn’t mind drawing attention to those obvious clues, details he hadn’t the time or opportunity to change. Feynriel could determine so much from how unkempt he was, but Hawke allowed it, the scritch of stubble against callused fingers, the cracks against his cuticles reddened by salt air from the sea. ‘…And revolution. Singular. There was only one of each, really; exaggeration just leads to disappointment, don’t you agree?’

‘Still, there’s nothing you can’t do,’ Feynriel said, and finally saw Hawke smile, with wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and everything.

It wasn’t the same as a Fereldan in-joke, but Hawke chuckled nonetheless, an arm slung companionably around Feynriel’s shoulders.

‘There is _one_ thing,’ he said. ‘Well, two—if you count the fact that I’ve never been able to touch my tongue to my nose. I’ve tried and tried, but it _just_ won’t reach.’

Feynriel pressed his tongue against the backs of his teeth. ‘…You need a _somniari_. Don’t you.’

‘How could you tell?’ Hawke asked.

‘A lucky guess,’ Feynriel said, though what he really meant was something more than that, and also more than instinct.

‘I went into the Fade once for you,’ Hawke began. ‘Not that you asked me to do it, that isn’t the point; and I don’t _really_ believe in favors or gratitude or I-owe-you’s, for a variety of reasons—not the least of which being, I’d prefer not to remember my outstanding debts with Varric. Do you know, he’s _ruthless_ when it comes to Wicked Grace, crueler to his friends than he is to his enemies…? And this is officially what he’d call _Deflection, Hawke_ ; I’d appreciate a stern look now if you have one in your arsenal, Feynriel. It’s what helps me keep on track—on the path, as it were, instead of wandering off into the moonflowers.’

Feynriel mustered the sort of frown that made Connor fail to roll his eyes. Sometimes, the expression even made his shoulders twitch, and Hawke winced, for Feynriel’s sake, extraordinarily.

‘That’s a good one,’ he said.

‘I try,’ Feynriel replied.

‘Somehow,’ Hawke continued, ‘it’s worse when you’re so much taller. I suppose that’s because I don’t mind it when my chest hair curls in terror, but can you imagine what my beard would look like if you terrified _it_ into different directions?’

Feynriel attempted the look again. It worked better the second time around; Hawke bit his lower lip, glancing down at the sandy earth beneath his boots, then up at the sky through the crackle of arcane energies.

‘You’re unfairly good at that,’ he said. ‘Right. Well then. The thing is—and I know it _might_ sound crazy, but then, most of the truest things do—I’ve a bit of a vested interest in someone who has a bit of a spirit-problem. It’s all well and good, or it was to a point, certainly _different_ , but lately there’ve been…complications. No, don’t give me the look again; my beard can’t take it, and despite how it seems, I _am_ trying my best.’ Hawke puffed his cheeks like a lad caught shoplifting in the bazaar, not a grown man with gray at his temples. ‘How about this: someone I know remembers himself less and less these days, and I can’t be certain if he’s losing himself to the Fade he’s part of, or if it’s just…personal forgetfulness. Where’s my other boot, and I can’t recall where I left my sock, and who are you again? That sort of thing.’

‘I’m not a blood mage, you know.’ Feynriel shifted under Hawke’s weight but didn’t shy away from it, nor did he shirk from the duty of maintaining the barrier despite the effort of dual concentrations. Upholding two standards at once—splitting his focus, splitting his duties—was all Feynriel knew. He’d practiced for this. He was more than ready. ‘I can’t read minds, and I can’t read yours now, either.’

‘If only you _could_ ,’ Hawke said. ‘…Not that I’m encouraging it. Don’t listen to me, Feynriel—I’m a terrible influence who’s made equally terrible life choices.’

‘You’re talking about Anders,’ Feynriel said.

At times, there was only one way to cut to the heart of the matter: the same way Feynriel’s master cut through the thick sesame cakes after dinner with one of his sharpest knives. He had no patience for burying other people’s truths beneath layers of obscurity, layers of sweetness. No good ever came from communicating less clearly.

That, and it was obvious something was dining upon Hawke, chewing through his inner flesh as a worm consumed its way toward the center of an apple. He would never leave such a worry behind—out of sight, where he couldn’t monitor its progress—and so that had to mean Anders after all, the one person from the stories and Hawke’s travels who’d managed to stick by him in the end, despite all his best efforts to be slippery.

Feynriel envied what he didn’t know: Anders’s secrets, whatever he’d done to stay so close.

Then again, if Hawke was asking what Feynriel thought, it seemed likely those secrets could be his to share soon enough.

‘ _Am_ I talking about Anders?’ Hawke asked, then flinched when Feynriel’s look caught him broadside. ‘You’re right. I suppose I am—in a manner of speaking. It’s been so long, you see; I’ve spent a great deal of time talking _to_ Anders, but not nearly enough talking _about_ him. Not since I parted ways with Varric, anyway. Won’t _he_ feel foolish skipping out on Tevinter, when he hears how many elephants I saw? He’s been writing about them all wrong—for one thing, they’re not _nearly_ so wrinkly—though I suppose dwarves _do_ see large creatures as…bigger, somehow. I suspect it’s all about perspective.’

Feynriel let his eyelids droop, lashes fluttering against his cheeks as he drew in a breath. The garden smelled of balmy ocean dew settled into the earth, and the flush green scent of growing things, wisping pale and sharply clean in his nostrils. The scent reminded him, for whatever reason, of Connor, as though he’d rushed in to interrupt their tryst here just as he had before in the hall.

Those memories lingered on the backs of Feynriel’s eyelids, fingers trailing through the moonflowers and shaking the star anise from the bushes.

‘Well, you didn’t come here for the elephants, did you?’ Somehow, Feynriel found it easier to be curt with Hawke if he had Connor in mind, employing the same system of checks and balances to keep his friend on the simple path that wound through the garden, instead of disappearing into shady groves and all their dusky shadows.

Maybe it was a Fereldan thing. They’d spent so long in the mud they could no longer distinguish the way forward from back—but that seemed an unkind thought, and Feynriel kept it to himself, for future looks instead of future comments.

Hawke shook his head and moved away, folding his arms as he settled his weight on his other side, almost proving Anders’s claim of a bad knee. He caught Feynriel’s eye before he grinned, and the glimmer of gold hidden in the depths of that gaze was warmer than a cluster of fireweed taking root by the northern gate.

‘You’re older,’ Hawke said finally. His words stirred the branches of Feynriel’s heart, making them rattle like Connor in the star anise, foliage shivering in the breeze. Feynriel drew in a breath, thinking of strength, of the _vhenadahl_ and its unyielding branches, instead of tangled little vines, knots and leaves and brambles. ‘I knew that—you’ve gotten all tall and frightening to look at sometimes—but you _act_ older, too. And don’t just say it’s because _I_ haven’t changed. I know personal growth when I see it, even if I’ve yet to experience any for myself.’

‘So…Anders has a spirit problem,’ Feynriel reminded him, insistently tugging at the thread, as though Hawke was a skein of fine Orlesian silk he might wind around a bobbin.

‘It’s a lot to ask, I know.’ Hawke spread his broad hands wide, as if to show there were no tricks up his sleeves because, in fact, his arms were bare. ‘I also know that you’ve had your own experiences in the Fade, and it hasn’t always been kind to you. I’m not sure where exactly you fall on the _are all spirits demons_ debate that’s been raging through Thedas these days, but I’m not asking you to talk to the spirit. He’s a bloody awful bore—I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.’ He paused as a wicked smile curved his lips. ‘…Well, maybe Sebastian. But I’ve been known to enjoy stirring the pot.’

‘Hawke,’ Feynriel said.

There was something intimate about the avoidance now, not imagined, not implied. The more Hawke tried to pretend how little it all meant, the more obvious it became that it meant too much, and Feynriel was no gardener, to hold and keep and encourage. He tended things, but not the growing kind, delicate roots in thin soil.

Yet whether or not Hawke was aware of what he was doing wasn’t any of Feynriel’s business.

Hawke hadn’t come for himself.

‘I was going to ask if you’d find him.’ Hawke rubbed the thumb with the broken nail against the corner of his mouth. It made a scratching noise, like a cat at the door, kittens kept in a rope basket down in the agora. ‘Difficult man to pin down, I know, but I kept thinking about that lovely jaunt we had a few years back, and one thing led to another…’

‘Him,’ Feynriel prompted.

‘…Anders,’ Hawke conceded, though the name seemed to give him some pain, more of an ache than a difficult knee.

They had salves for that, balms, oils and creams kept in little marble pots—better than poultices, all the magisters of Tevinter said, and all its merchants too, with a wink and a nod to the state of Thedas elsewhere. When Feynriel thought about leaving a few in Hawke’s room, a present of hospitality and personal as it was, a flush crept down the center of his chest.

Connor would laugh at him for that.

Hawke cleared his throat, yet another sound, yet another distraction. ‘When you want a job done your way, you do it yourself. When you want it done _well_ , you generally ask someone else.’

‘I was impressed when you found me,’ Feynriel said. ‘That was a job done well.’

‘Lyrium.’ Hawke looked pleased, but waved a self-deprecating hand anyway. ‘It works wonders. And horrors, too. Don’t ever forget about the horrors.’

‘And no one’s mind was scrambled, either,’ Feynriel continued. ‘You have no idea how remarkable that really is.’

‘Flatterer,’ Hawke replied. He also had no idea that Feynriel was anything but, and Feynriel mustered the beginnings of another look, enough for Hawke to hold up his hands in defeat. ‘No, please, not the threats of a curly beard again—I was just getting to the rest. Him. _Anders._ And…the other fellow. Whenever we travel to the Fade, he’s always Justice, but Anders— _Anders_ must be somewhere in there, too, dreaming with the others.’

There was more of a question in the statement than not, and Hawke acknowledged it by smiling even wider.

‘Surely he must,’ he repeated. ‘Having…tea with Valor or arguing with Rage or napping with Sloth or something. Little cat naps. That’s _always_ how I pictured it.’

A lifetime of learning could no more explain the truth to Hawke than Feynriel could explain it to himself. For a brief moment, the urge to share it was there, the urge to try despite inevitable failures to communicate—it was the same urge that found Connor and Feynriel in dreams together, experimentation and learning but also, Feynriel admitted at last, petty desire.

It wasn’t that being with someone made anything less lonely, especially not the Fade, and there was no ally against dreaming itself—but there were touches in the mist, gestures through the darkness, that meant something more than comfort.

Even still, the answer was in none of the many tomes on the subject, the feeling in none of the ink and dust or the heavy fall of parchment as each page was turned. Somewhere between the binding and a reader’s fingertips, new meaning was made, and it was all so personal, and Feynriel had never known how to share it.

There was no one like him. He knew the dreaming world too well to imagine there was, or that it mattered.

He told himself it didn’t.

‘There are rules,’ Feynriel said. ‘Not general rules. _My_ rules.’

‘No breaking and entering into a man’s head or heart without his explicit permission, you mean?’ Hawke still cupped his chin between his thumb and forefinger, as though he couldn’t let go. ‘That sounds reasonable to me. I like to imagine I’d be the same way, with or without liberal doses of spying on the wicked. That’s why I’ve made…arrangements. Sort of. He’s willing to try…what he can. Or rather, what someone else can. He _is_ willing.’

A man always wanted to know himself, and always thought dreams were the road to knowledge—Feynriel had learned that in his time and in his travels. He’d studied so hard and for so long, and the offer to find the truth, one’s real thoughts within the canvas of a dream was tempting indeed—though the odds were like finding one small fish in a wide-cast net, one thread in an Orlesian story tapestry.

But it was possible.

‘…Of course, I _might_ have told him we were coming here for the weather and the accessories.’ Hawke leaned against a tree, favoring his bad leg, crossing it at the ankle. ‘The man has a _thing_ for Tevinter amulets—don’t ask me why, because I’ve never understood it—and don’t get me started on Simir feathers, either. You saw that jacket of his. Those birds aren’t endangered, are they? Because they’re about to be. Feynriel, I can’t help but notice you’re not talking very much, and that leaves everything up to _me_.’

‘What _did_ you arrange?’ Feynriel asked.

Hawke waved one travel-chapped hand. ‘ _I’ll meet you in your dreams_ —doesn’t that all sound so romantic? It might not be the honeymoon in Antiva he’s always wanted, but we _did_ get to go to Rivain, and surely that has to mean _something_.’

It meant they’d gone to Rivain, Feynriel thought, but held his tongue.

‘You can’t find someone if they don’t want to be found,’ Feynriel said, and Hawke closed his eyes.

‘I know _that_ ,’ he replied. ‘You do what you can, for as long as you can, and the good thing is…dreams don’t involve running, do they? Too much of that and you end up with a damn fool knee that won’t do half the things it used to.’

‘My knees are fine, currently,’ Feynriel said. ‘And…we have oils for that. Hot baths. While you’re here, you might as well make use of everything.’

Hawke clapped him on the shoulder; Feynriel was growing accustomed to that at last, as well as the subsequent heaviness, and he knew their conversation was drawing to its natural conclusion even as dawn made its gray way toward them. He felt wicked and dangerous and alive, and that was troublesome; he wouldn’t sleep the last few hours of the night, but meditate in preparation, and Connor would call it ‘a mood’ in the morning, and Hawke would smell of unguents from the far reaches of Qarinus, ingredients gathered from the tangled jungles of Seheron, all the way across the Nocen Sea.

They were all a blend of something, herbs and liquids crushed to paste between mortar and pestle.

Feynriel took the barrier down.

‘I’ll get you a signed paper or something, how about that?’ Hawke said as they made their way back along the path, back toward the big house proper. Feynriel was content to be the tour guide, to remind Hawke of all the rooms he was only visiting, to return him to a place of rest, if only until sunrise. ‘I like the robes, by the way. Very impressive. You should get one of those metal bits for your ears, as well—unless it’s not as fashionable as it looks? I can never tell, with these things, and I was the poor fool wearing embroidered vests so long after they were hideously out of style. I thought they made me look _trim_.’

‘I was thinking about it,’ Feynriel admitted, and Hawke nodded in approval before he slipped away, silently despite himself. He did it to acknowledge someone else’s request—while leaving Feynriel to contemplate his.

*

Feynriel’s meditation didn’t go well that night; for the first time in recent recollection, the order he maintained felt disjointed, without a deeper meaning or purpose. He lost concentration too many times to count, body tangled in his own sleeping robes and the fine cotton weave of his summer sheets.

It was only once the sky began to stretch soft gray fingers of dawn against the inky black of true night that he allowed himself to slip free of his bed, giving up on the private realm in favor of doing something more productive.

He ran himself a bath, luxuriating in a privacy he rarely experienced in his master’s houses, neither in Marnus Pell nor in Minrathous. There were always slaves at hand or underfoot, and while Feynriel couldn’t resent them for simply doing their duty—everything and everyone had its proper place in the Imperium, and slavery was the oldest institution of all, as old as magic or perhaps even older than that—he wasn’t comfortable with the consistency of their presence.

There was no way to wake earlier than a slave, unless you chose not to sleep at all.

‘It’s just because you weren’t born here,’ Connor always said, as though _he_ was, or as though the few years he’d lived in Minrathous before Feynriel first dreamed of the black spires made all the difference. ‘Slavery’s still illegal in Kirkwall, isn’t it?’

 _Yes,_ Feynriel always replied. _Yes_ , slavery was illegal in Kirkwall. But there were worse things than slavery, sometimes, Gallows towers instead of slaving holds locked low underground, and the hidden promise of more gruesome practices—such as the Tranquil, with their sun-bright brands littering the Gallows courtyard. That was a fate Feynriel had avoided only narrowly, thanks to Hawke’s intervention, and the memory fell across him like the shadow of Kirkwall architecture, gooseflesh prickling his bare skin as he cast aside his robes.

Whether things had worsened or been made better by Anders’s actions was for someone else to say—someone who’d been there, to see things unraveling for themselves, and to see them now. But even Feynriel’s mother wasn’t there any longer, moving on with the Dalish as perhaps she’d always needed.

Now, Feynriel couldn’t keep himself from thinking of Anders even when he was thinking of everything else, mind running circular courses like a painted carousel at Satinalia. Normally he’d have blamed it on how tired he was, but as he sank into his bath in hot water up to the neck, Feynriel knew it wasn’t that simple.

Being this tired was nothing, barely worthy of a single yawn. One summer he’d spent a full week wide awake, until the sound of laughter from the villa next door turned to desire demons calling his name, and every blink was a betrayal to his body, relinquishing him like a slaver to the master of sleep.

It had less to do with Anders, and more to do with Hawke; his appearance was troubling enough, and his request even more so. It helped to explain some things and to complicate others. Feynriel understood the hunted look in Hawke’s gaze, and why he’d seemed like an old bone being worried under a hound’s sharp fangs, but there was no salve for those aches, not even in dreaming.

Insight and understanding meant he could feel the dog’s teeth chewing at him; they demanded an answer to a new problem, without offering the tools for solution.

Feynriel wasn’t afraid of the challenge, but there were risks implied—someone else’s dreams at stake, someone else’s magic, someone else’s mind.

He used all the most calming scents in the bath, oils and soaps specifically designed to focus thoughts and banish anxieties. There was sandalwood for warmth and lavender for comfort, along with a floral blend his master had mixed specially from the Marnus Pell gardens, a smell that didn’t just remind him of summer—it was a part of summer, or summer itself. When Feynriel used it in his hair, he could smell the moonflowers in his braid, the crushed green grass under his boots, and the soft, sultry winds that blew in off the bay.

No matter where he spent the day, a familiar scent was an invisible tool, the touch of a hand, the squeeze of strong fingers and a warm palm. No one would look twice at him over the indulgence, and that was what made it ideal.

 _You smell like a garden,_ Connor would say, leaning too close for a liberal sniff. Then, he’d complain that Feynriel’s hair had tickled his nose, as though it was Feynriel’s fault that happened, not his.

The sun had risen fully by the time Feynriel finished with his bath. He could hear the servants outside beginning to light the torches in the corridors, preparing to start breakfast for the master and the apprentice and their unplanned guests, both of whom were unknown factors and might need attention earlier, or later—or who might scorn attention, or who might demand it. They had their business and more, something for Feynriel to feel guilty over at a later date, something that no amount of guilt could help; their work left Feynriel alone to plait his damp hair, running his fingers through the familiar pattern, over and under as a courser chased a rabbit.

When he was too little to remember everything, his mother had sung to him about coursers and rabbits. But try as he might, Feynriel couldn’t recall the words, just the slip and slide of melody, the slip and slide of each matching plait.

He was half into his second-favorite pair of summer robes, a light knit with impossible straps everywhere—Connor said it made him look like a Rivaini swamp flower, all bright colors and sharp foliage to warn of its carnivorous nature—when there was a sharp tap at the door.

‘Up already?’ Hawke asked as the door swung inward; he leaned against the frame, legs crossed at the ankles, but Feynriel knew the reasons for his posture, if not the reasons for his pain. ‘You know, when I was your age, I always slept in past noon or later whenever I could. If I had a bed _that_ nice, I’d’ve done it all the time.’

‘And what about now?’ Feynriel replied. His fingers had lost their rhythm, and there was a lump in his braid, at the very bottom, enough of an imperfection to make him want to start the whole thing over again.

His master said the best spells were those that time or circumstance interrupted, the best tapestries never made in a single day or from a single thread. They all needed to learn to mend their mistakes without trashing everything that came before—in some misguided hope to find everything that came after it—but like most lessons, they were no more easy to parse than they were to put into play.

‘The older you get, the less you sleep.’ Hawke ran his fingers through his hair, short but shaggy; the idea of him wearing any braids, his callused fingers attempting the pattern, allowed Feynriel to fix his without further incident, without undoing all his hard work. ‘It’s a known fact. The one thing we _all_ have in common, mage or no—but don’t tell Anders I said that.’

‘I’m not looking forward to that,’ Feynriel said, standing. ‘It isn’t as though I get that much sleep already.’

Hawke waited for him to cross the room before he stepped out into the hallway, stretching his arms behind his head, palms at the back of his neck. ‘Perhaps you’ll discover a balm for eternal youth. Sometimes I feel as though everyone I know is _always_ inventing balms.’

It was another one of his little jokes, and he might have intended for Feynriel to cast him another one of his little looks; one for the other, a banter they shared despite themselves. It didn’t mean as much as it might have, or as much as Feynriel wanted it to—as much as he thought it did, when he was only observing it, the outsider’s perspective making it seem so much larger than it was.

‘That isn’t my area,’ Feynriel admitted.

‘Pity.’ Hawke dropped his hands, rubbing his thumbs against his forefingers. ‘I’m starting to wonder if my laugh-lines make me look classically handsome or just plain _tired_. What do you think?’

‘I…hadn’t noticed,’ Feynriel said. He caught sight of the wrinkles in question, deep grooves that he suspected had always been there—he couldn’t picture Hawke without them, the crinkles beside his dark lashes when he grinned, the other crinkles that were hidden by the dark shape of his beard.

‘That’s cruel indeed, Feynriel,’ Hawke said, touching one hand to his chest, right over the spot where his heart would be. ‘You might as well tell me they make me look ancient—it’s worse when someone _doesn’t even notice_.’

Hawke was accustomed to being noticed, Feynriel realized, as they stepped into the dining room, Hawke polishing a local fruit against the front of his robes just before Feynriel chose to do the same, rubbing the sleek skin along the inside of his sleeve. Feynriel’s arm came away dusty while the fruit practically gleamed.

He was careful while he ate it, accustomed to being noticed, too—but for different reasons, not always terrible ones, though he once wished when he was younger and therefore less specific that he might be just like anyone else. Not everyone else—that much was impossible—but a few people wouldn’t hurt, or so he thought. He wanted nothing more than to find something he had in common, rather than all the things he didn’t.

Even then, sharing the similarities wasn’t enough, because of all the differences.

Hawke bit into his fruit lustily, then looked guilty when Feynriel stared at him. ‘Peaches,’ he explained, and sighed, shaking his head. ‘These used to be my brother’s _favorite_. Now he’s a bit of a Grey Warden, and I hear the process changes a man. I always told him it would’ve made more sense if he preferred prunes, given his disposition—but little brothers can be _so_ contradictory.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Feynriel said.

‘Well, there’s that lad.’ Hawke wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not his sleeve, then sucked the juice off his fingertips. ‘Connor, wasn’t it? Connor Guerrin… He seems a good sort. Knows all the best Fereldan jokes, too. _Delightful_.’

Feynriel’s teeth hit the pit of his peach. He reached for a napkin, folding it within, setting it aside, while Hawke ranged from column to column, from side-table to side-table, inspecting artifacts and incense-bowls and unlit lamps along the way.

‘I’ll need to do some research,’ Feynriel said. ‘I’ve never done the sort of… _thing_ you’re asking before, and I just want to be sure—’

‘—that I don’t end up with a raving madman for a traveling companion?’ Hawke paused in his inspection of the room, holding up a burnished set of candlesticks, one in each hand. ‘Yes. That _would_ be awful. I wouldn’t know what it’s like, of course, but I can only imagine it would be…trying. Terrible. Terrifying. Lovely candlesticks, by the way.’

Feynriel almost indulged in a hiccup of a laugh. He must have eaten too quickly, but Hawke’s eyes flashed in gratitude, while Feynriel rubbed his fingers clean on the napkin.

‘So,’ Hawke continued. ‘This…research. Does it include sewers and smells and shit? That’s the only research _I’ve_ ever done.’

‘Not exactly,’ Feynriel said.

‘Then sign me up,’ Hawke replied.

*

The libraries at Marnus Pell weren’t as magnificent as those at Minrathous—they’d been burned twice before, but the collection was still more than the rest of Thedas outside the Imperium had, and with more freedom of scope and topic, most of the censored tomes not ones Feynriel had reason to inquire after, anyway. Hawke walked the city streets at Feynriel’s side, though he confessed he wished they were riding on elephants the whole way.

‘Whenever I come to a new city, I always expect to be approached by smugglers,’ he added. ‘I wonder why that is? Do I have a particularly untrustworthy face? Is it the profile? Something about my nose?’

Feynriel observed the aforementioned face more closely than before, as closely as he could, but saw only those laugh-lines, neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy—or too much a combination of both.

‘You’re staring,’ Hawke said, but with a different quality of voice than Connor usually employed when noting the same phenomenon. ‘That wasn’t a _serious_ question, you know. It was meant to be rhetorical, so that you could say ‘Oh no, Hawke, you’ve got a _perfectly_ handsome face; diabolically handsome, in fact, and I’ve no idea why bad things keep happening to such a good person.’ Then I’d feel so much better about myself, and _you’d_ feel better having done your good deed for the day. Or are bad deeds what’s praised most in Tevinter? I can never be sure, this close to Seheron.’

‘Actually, most accolades are given for one’s efficiency in a duel.’ Feynriel took note of the way his bootheels smacked smartly against the cobblestones, and the way Hawke’s didn’t. ‘If you can kill a man without staining your robes, they _always_ make you into a magister.’

Hawke laughed, then turned it into a startled cough. Those weren’t the official rules, and even Hawke saw it—but Feynriel’s tongue was loose with the warmth of the sun beating down on the crown of his head, banishing the night’s chill that had settled over him even after his bath.

His body betrayed him in many small ways, always weakest when he didn’t sleep, and a loss of proper temperature regulation was often the first threshold to give way. Feynriel dressed in layers when he wasn’t resting properly, but he hadn’t planned for night-long meditative efforts when he’d packed his summer wardrobe to Marnus Pell.

There was nothing to be done for it now, except to pick out one of the long window seats in the library, somewhere in a broad shaft of sweet sun.

‘Was that a _joke,_ Feynriel?’ Hawke asked, as they made their way up the crumbling marble staircase, twin dragon statues set at the top on either railing. ‘If you aren’t careful, I’ll start to imagine I’m rubbing off on you. And I’m told that sort of thing doesn’t help with my already swollen ego.’

‘Like your knee,’ Feynriel said.

Hawke scoffed, deep in the back of his throat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. My knee’s as healthy as a herd of halla.’

‘Ah,’ Feynriel replied. When he opened the door, he had to put his shoulder into it; the structure’s reinforcements much heavier, rebuilt after the second fire. ‘…I don’t think that’s any expression I’ve ever heard before.’

‘Then again, you’re only _half_ Dalish.’ Hawke braced the door for Feynriel so he could pass through without being crushed. It slammed behind them both, echoing across the marble, enough to make Hawke whistle. ‘It’s only to be expected. Don’t feel _too_ bad over it.’

‘I wasn’t planning to,’ Feynriel said. Already, he could feel the weight of the library’s atmosphere, dust motes swirling in the daylight over the whisper of thick pages being turned, parchment and vellum rattling in the dry air, the ache of overburdened bookcases.

There were wards set in place by a few old archons to keep the ocean’s humidity from damaging the hundreds of ancient manuscripts, easy enough to side-step when you knew where they were. But it was those same wards that made the library so susceptible to small fires, helping even as they hindered—the very principle of exchange and bargain and sacrifice that balanced all other spells.

There were also runes, ascribed to each column, detailing the organization and topic of every painstaking stack, the tall shelves stretching from ceiling to floor and casting shadows through the natural light. Feynriel’s nose twitched from the dust, and he drew out the handkerchief he’d kept up his sleeve for such moments, time spent in amongst the books when Connor hadn’t coaxed him to skip out for a long, salty walk, exploring sand and coves—which the neighboring shores had in dwarven diamonds.

‘Well now,’ Hawke said, with the air of someone who’d just stepped in a pile left by a sick mabari. He slung an arm around Feynriel’s shoulders, as always, resting his weight there for a few, scant breaths. ‘If this is how you throw a party in Tevinter, Feynriel, I’m afraid I’ll have to rethink my retirement plans.’

‘It’s research,’ Feynriel reminded him. _Your research,_ he added silently, and Hawke sensed the words, even if he didn’t hear them.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Hawke’s face hadn’t fallen, but the lines by his eyes were tighter. ‘ _My_ research always involves something a little more…slimy. I used to think I’d prefer something simple, like dusty old pages, but it’s libraries that always make you reconsider.’

‘That’s the point,’ Feynriel said, only Hawke had meant it another way.

They took a table near the back, beneath a window just like Feynriel wanted, his chair illuminated by a slimmer shaft of sunlight than was preferable, but it would have to do. Hawke helped by getting down the heavier tomes, those shelved too high for Feynriel to reach, even on tip-toe. Then, he undid all his help by sitting across the table and cupping his bearded cheek in one hand, staring thoughtfully and without blinking—while Feynriel attempted to read accounts of a mage who’d traveled to cure his wife’s forgetfulness by entering her mind in the Fade.

He didn’t need to reach the end to know it wouldn’t be a happy one.

‘That’s the trouble with stories.’ Hawke traced a natural whorl in the polished wood all the way to a knot, then slid his thumb against the blackened burn, following the circle smaller and smaller until he’d tucked his finger inside of it. ‘And why I never read them. _Living_ them is bad enough.’

‘The trouble was love,’ Feynriel said. ‘It complicated everything.’ His fingers already felt not dirty but not clean, the age and grime he accumulated whenever he read old books. There were the memories from the scribes, the memories of every fingerprint ever pressed to the page by each eager reader, and they’d chosen a dull corner, velvet bindings and gilded lettering all musty with disuse.

Hawke wrinkled his nose. ‘ _I_ think the trouble is dust.’

He shifted forward, onto one elbow, sleeve rolled up above the wrist. There was a pale scar before dark hair, scattered without the care of black ink shaping words on a white page. Feynriel blinked, then closed his book, with a slightly less final slam than the library door.

‘Anyway,’ Hawke said, ‘it’s _practically_ as though I write the stories myself. You can always change an ending. But if you find anything _scandalous_ , feel free to share.’

‘I’ll keep you informed,’ Feynriel replied, and slid the next tome toward himself, Hawke’s hands pressed against the other side to help move the book across the table.

He’d barely cracked the binding, a gust of fresh dust—or old dust; the former was a contradiction in terms—clouding up from the first page, when he felt warmth at his back, warmer than the pale sunlight from the window. He turned to see if the sun had come out from behind a patch of clouds, but there was only shadow, Connor leaning too close from one end while Hawke leaned too close on the other.

‘You’re here,’ Feynriel said.

Connor, out of breath, tugged at his braid and set his staff aside. ‘Don’t sound too excited. I _might_ get ideas.’

‘ _Now_ it’s finally starting to look more like a party,’ Hawke said.

‘Exactly,’ Connor agreed. ‘You can’t have a party with only two people. That’s more of a—’

‘Private affair?’ Hawke shifted his chin to his other palm; he didn’t bother with leaping to his feet or standing at all, no bows or bobs of the head or tugs of his unkempt forelock, nothing more than a simple, square-shaped wave of his free hand that moved gracefully through the air. Feynriel would always see it with a distant glow, the memory of arcane fire in his grasp as he offered himself as collateral in an old slaving tunnel. ‘I’m almost certain it’s just my smuggler’s face. Feynriel told me all about it on our way here.’

‘That’s probably a _Fereldan_ thing.’ Connor slipped in at Feynriel’s side, over the hard bench, grimacing as his ass hit the marble. He always complained that Imperium libraries were never comfortable enough, though Feynriel thought it was for the best, to read through pain just as clearly as they were meant to work through it. The finest lessons were never taught in silence and peace. Distraction itself was a method and a system to be approached and understood and incorporated—though at the moment, there was nothing but distraction, dust making Feynriel’s nose wrinkle. ‘ _Free marchers_ wouldn’t understand it, and elves _definitely_ wouldn’t. Andraste’s wretched _ass_ , it smells like the catacombs back here.’

‘Since when do you say Andraste’s wretched ass?’ Feynriel asked.

‘Varric thought up catchphrases for me,’ Hawke murmured, chin still perched in his cupped palm. ‘He said it sounded dashing, but I could never tell if they were just a bit _too_ precious or not. When do we ever stop, in the middle of a battle, to say to a companion something about flaming knickerweasels? I mean, _really_.’

‘I say Andraste’s wretched ass all the time,’ Connor replied.

‘Yet another ‘Fereldan thing?’’ Feynriel watched as Connor shrugged, ignoring the question, leaning in to peer at the open book. Whatever he saw, he didn’t like it, the scruff on his cheek darker in the shadow—though it was no more than a trick of the light.

‘And here I thought I was being left out of something fun,’ he said. ‘This is one of the best days Marnus Pell has ever seen and _you’re_ trying to depress yourself. As always.’

‘Awful, isn’t it?’ Hawke blinked; Feynriel glared. ‘Well, it’s true. A dangerous personality trait, not to mention. I’ve seen it destroy so _many_ in my time. _I_ wanted to go digging through the sewers, but Feynriel had other plans in mind.’

‘He always does,’ Connor agreed.

Feynriel flicked the hair out of his eyes one-handed, doing his best not to scowl. Not even the look Hawke appreciated so much had its place here, when all Connor wanted was a reaction, and all Hawke wanted was attention, and neither of them appreciated the importance of Feynriel’s work—not even the one who’d traveled so long and so far to seek it out. Sensing the trouble he’d caused just by showing up, Connor bumped Feynriel’s boot beneath the table with his own, and Feynriel bumped back—only it must have been too hard, because Connor looked affronted, personally offended by it.

‘Are you trying to break my toes?’ Connor asked.

‘Now, Feynriel, that’s not how you do it.’ Hawke’s boots finally made some noise as their heels scuffed the marble floor. ‘More of a gentle touch is _always_ appreciated—unless, I’ve found, you’re dealing with Orlesians. They like a bit of pain every now and then.’

‘ _I’m_ part Orlesian,’ Connor said.

Hawke blinked again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he replied.

It wasn’t an apology for the insult, but rather the state of affairs that caused it. Feynriel waited for Connor’s shoulders to twitch forward and his jaw to harden, but instead his lips parted and he laughed, shaking his head, little braid bobbing against his throat.

‘I like being funny,’ Hawke said. ‘It’s so rare to have someone appreciate your…talents. Feynriel, your friend is delightful.’

‘And _you’re_ the first person I’ve met in Tevinter who’s bothered making a joke in a library.’ Connor glanced to Feynriel, then away, only his profile and his almost-bearded chin visible, the flush of heat over the pink shell of his ear, the little shadow in the hollow of his cheekbone, and the slight hook at the very top of his nose. Feynriel made a face, not the same face he made for Hawke, and Connor’s elbow bumped Feynriel’s arm as he pressed forward against the table.

Feynriel looked down at the pages in front of him—an account by a young magister who’d attempted to restore his father’s memories after he’d lost them in an accident, then taken to living as a Nevarran dragon hunter. He flipped through it idly, feeling the thump of Connor’s foot against his instep like a second heartbeat, one that distracted him even as it soothed.

That was Connor all over, the flush of blooming moonflowers counterbalanced by brighter colors, scents and shapes that erupted from the ground simply for vanity’s sake—because Connor knew he could do it, and not because he needed to.

His master enjoyed the notoriety, giving his favored allies bouquets full of rare flowers—like Antivan lace, and red demonblossoms from the Anderfels. But Feynriel knew there was more to Connor’s talents than performing tricks to win favor, just as he knew there was more to Connor than making off-color jokes and jiggling in his seat at inopportune moments whenever Hawke looked at him side-long.

‘So,’ Connor said, craning his neck to steal a glimpse at the last paragraph on the page before Feynriel turned it, ‘what in Andraste’s wretched ass are you reading? That looks like the quickest way to suck the good mood from your bones—am I right?’

‘I _believe_ you’re thinking of marrow,’ Hawke said. Feynriel didn’t need to look over in order to see the smile passing across his face, hidden in the clip of his beard. It made Feynriel’s collar tighten, even though he hadn’t swallowed, but it wasn’t an all-around pleasant sensation. On the contrary, it was as though Feynriel could feel any productivity in their plans already slipping away, like so much sand beneath a sandal. Hawke’s focus—never exemplary to begin with—had already been shifted, almost as though he never wanted the answers to his questions, in case they were something he didn’t want to hear. ‘You suck _marrow_ from bones, not the fun. Well, I don’t _personally_ do it, but I hear it’s a delicacy in certain areas of Orlais.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.’ Connor reached out to run his thumb over the corner of the nearest page, a blister blackening the fragile skin of his cuticle in the very corner, where it met his nail. ‘So I’m afraid I can’t tell whether that’s an insult or just plain fact.’

‘Not jumping to take slight at every little thing?’ Hawke shook his head, tutting. ‘No, I’m sorry; you _can’t_ be part Orlesian. Are you sure it isn’t something more amenable—like part Rivaini, for example? Now _there’s_ a lusty group of natural compromisers.’

Connor laughed, worrying old parchment under his fingertips. ‘It’d be news to my mother.’

‘You’re making it very hard to read,’ Feynriel said, with the rare hope that it might mean something to either of them. Chances were it would be nothing more than another point for Hawke and Connor to connect over: humorless, long-legged, march-stomper Feynriel attempting to focus on the task at hand. Never mind that it was a task Hawke had set him to—his worry manifested itself in more tangible ways, and one had only to listen to the accounts of the Champion of Kirkwall to know that he wasn’t a man who sat around in libraries researching his next plan of attack.

Dreams weren’t his realm. He charged through them anyway. Perhaps the whole thing had been an accident, two fools seeking each other, the same way Feynriel had met Connor—really met him, not across a narrow hall, because of a flick of balled parchment accidentally hitting him in the side of his face.

Connor still hadn’t apologized for that. Feynriel no longer thought he would.

As half-expected, Hawke sighed at Feynriel’s reprimand and stretched his bad leg out beneath the table, his knee joint cracking in sharp protest at being held still for so long.

‘How rude of me,’ he sighed, tucking up his shoulders so the pauldrons appeared to be bristling. ‘It’s been a while since anyone’s acknowledged my sense of humor. Or humor itself, really. Grim crowd, my friends. And those that weren’t grim all cleared off quickly enough—I suppose you could say the funny ones were the smart ones, too. They usually are.’

‘That doesn’t speak very well for that Anders fellow you came in with,’ Connor said.

Feynriel had been thinking it. Connor gave it voice.

‘Ah. _Him._ ’ Hawke spread his hands against the table, then turned them over, seeking out his lifeline. There was a red spot on his index finger where a hangnail had become inflamed, and he picked at it, looking uncomfortable. ‘Well—he doesn’t count. Not as a…friend, per se.’

‘Oh,’ Connor said.

 _Oh_ , Feynriel thought. It made sense; it all did. He’d expected it, or suspected it, a system of deductions the entire time that hadn’t required acknowledgment. Hawke rubbed at the corner of his mouth with his thumb, and Feynriel waited patiently for the Antivan leather boot to drop, for the scene that was meant to follow.

But there was nothing—no kicking up off the bench, no turning red as a Fereldan turnip in the sun, no bristling of the baby beard. Connor scratched the scruffy line of his jaw along the backs of his chapped knuckles instead, and leaned into Feynriel’s side, the warmth of his body taking some of the chill from the library’s marbled benches.

‘ _Oh_ ,’ Hawke agreed. ‘That seems to be the general consensus of everyone I talk to, these days. I often wonder what it is I’ve said.’

‘Something about smugglers, no doubt,’ Feynriel suggested. ‘Or something about your face. Those _seem_ to be your favorite topics.’

‘Some of us have a habit of making everything we say seem important.’ Hawke’s knee cracked again, and this time he acquiesced to touch it, soothing it out somewhere beneath the table where no one else could see. ‘…Or insulting. Or a combination of both. Connor, you’d best look out for this one—I think _he’s_ got that talent, too, whether he knows it or not.’

‘ _I_ know it,’ Connor replied.

Feynriel gave him the look, and rather than smiling or flinching or anything of the sort, Connor gave him one right back. It was a silly, cross-eyed thing that hadn’t been appropriate even when he was a young lad, without the extra height he needed to look like much of anyone. Feynriel had grown with him, but also faster than him; he hadn’t noticed the width of his shoulders beneath the open fall of his cotton top, or the way the hair on his chest now matched the hair on his jaw-line, scant and not as dark as it might have been.

A few locks of Feynriel’s hair slid past his ear again, nothing sharply angled to keep the fall pinned in place, and Connor did him the honor of fighting that impossible fight, pushing it back where it belonged.

‘…I need a walk,’ Hawke said suddenly. ‘I forgot that sitting around doing nothing always reminds me—I don’t know _how_ to sit around doing nothing. And there isn’t anything more uncomfortable than doing something you can’t. Well, no—maybe gossiping about the Knight-Commander when she happens to be standing right behind you, but one you can save by being charming and utterly untouchable, and one you can’t. No, don’t get up; I’ll show myself around. Maybe _you’re_ the reason I wasn’t approached by any smugglers, Feynriel.’

Smugglers were the sort of topic Connor enjoyed, the company that—in theory—he’d prefer over books, or over Feynriel, though not over dragons or elephants. It was a hierarchy Feynriel didn’t study or uphold, but for whatever reason he knew the order, and wondered why he knew it, what space it took up in his thoughts and his mind where other, better knowledge should have occupied its place.

‘Perhaps I’ll even be challenged to a duel,’ Hawke added, straightening, his hands at the small of his back. ‘Good luck with your marrow sucking—or whatever it is. Maybe I’ll see you both for supper. But I’m sure Connor will help you put those books back where they belong. Fereldans are always good for something, even if it’s no more than heavy lifting.’

Feynriel tapped the bridge of his nose, just between his brows, watching Hawke leave. He touched one of the bookcases as he went, fingers capable of so much more than waving, though that was all he did on his way out. Feynriel didn’t have to worry he wouldn’t find his way back; he didn’t have to imagine Hawke in the sun, heading down to one of the beaches, exploring the coves with the same enthusiasm Connor had—not just the first time, but every time, the same stone shaped differently each year by the same tides, not always holding against the same winds.

He didn’t have to imagine Connor would enjoy it there with him.

‘Well?’ Feynriel said.

‘…Well?’ Connor replied.

‘You _could_ go join lyrium smugglers for a day or sea-raiders or sea-monsters or something.’ Feynriel glanced back down to the same line he’d read ten times now, words that might as well have had no meaning. He had to start again, from the top, one of the rare instances where giving up mid-way was acceptable. ‘That’s what he does, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘It _would_ be fun,’ Connor agreed. ‘Can’t you see me in leathers?’

‘No,’ Feynriel told him.

Connor sighed. ‘Somehow, I _knew_ you’d say that. Why did I _even_ ask?’

He crouched forward, picking up one of the smaller books. Feynriel began to say he’d read that one already, but different readers were like different writers, and there were some perspectives they couldn’t share, not even when they shared each other’s dreams. Feynriel sighed instead, not as deep as Hawke while rubbing the tender joint in his knee, but deep enough, already feeling the hair Connor had pushed back sliding free. Some was caught under his collar, tickling his skin, and it would have felt good to tug it away so it would stop prickling, but something stayed his hand.

A moment later, Connor saw to it instead, already flipping past the introduction toward a later chapter.

‘What is it we’re doing, anyway?’ he asked.

Feynriel didn’t have as much of an idea as he should, but the words were falling into place at last, the silence of the library halls tempered by all the noise of Connor moving, living, breathing. And talking—Feynriel couldn’t forget that, because Connor wouldn’t let him forget it, and not in the same way Hawke wouldn’t let him forget it.

There were no pauldrons, for one thing, and a less impressive beard, and far less teeth-flashing whenever Connor smiled—and the differences weren’t that important, save for how clearly Feynriel noticed them, in Hawke’s absence, in Connor’s refusal to be absent.

‘It’s just research,’ Feynriel replied. ‘It has to do with the idea of…finding someone hiding in the Fade. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer smugglers?’

Connor’s face shifted, turning regal, lips pursed and eyes lidded—the same expression he always wore when he was imitating Feynriel’s master, sucking in a breath, maintaining overwhelming posture. ‘We cannot be _sure_ of anything,’ he said, then laughed, then shrugged one-shouldered. ‘Sounds dangerous. Better than smugglers, even. Look, if this is for—’

But Feynriel held up a hand, having found meanings and memories at last, the urge to do what it was he still didn’t know if he could.

He heard Connor’s puff of defeat, or of acceptance—if the two weren’t secretly one and the same—followed by, ‘I’ll do what I can; you know that,’ and Feynriel felt his mouth begin, in a tight way, to smile.

*

Connor’s stomach was grumbling by the time they were finished; he was keener to discuss Nevarran dragon hunters than whatever Feynriel had found, or hadn’t found, dream-walking so inconclusive it might as well have been called dream-wandering, a more accurate term.

‘I think the reason there’s so few of you _somniari_ is that most up and die of boredom before they ever come of age,’ Connor said, climbing down from the ladder—where he’d been shelving the last of their books.

Hawke was right about Fereldans being good for heavy lifting, even if Feynriel was taller, and better able to reach the top shelves without assistance. Connor seemed to find it important despite his literal shortcomings, or because of them, and Feynriel didn’t argue, content to lean against their table while he stretched his legs, rolling out first one stiff ankle, then the other

Neither of them cracked the way Hawke’s joints did.

The well-worn leather of his boots moved easily with his ministrations, the upper malleable to contrast with the sturdy heel. He straightened as Connor touched down to the floor, shrugging his braid back over one shoulder.

‘It’s a rare gift,’ Feynriel said, quoting what the keeper had once told him. ‘Or…a rare curse.’

‘Funny how those things usually end up being the same, isn’t it?’ Connor didn’t look like he wanted to laugh at his own joke. Instead, he held onto a restless energy somewhere in his tight shoulders and balled fists, which lent color to the pallor of his skin and a brightness to the depth of his eyes—like one of the glass globes in Feynriel’s master’s study chamber, imbued with arcane light. The same arcane light flitted through all vessels in the Imperium, even those lit by hand, magic in every flame and behind every glow.

There wasn’t anything about Connor’s gaze that made Feynriel feel wistful—not the way he did those nights he gazed from his bedroom window in Marnus Pell, down to the lit gateway below and the black stretch of the ocean somewhere close beyond that. Those nights were as infinite as the sky, and Connor’s eyes weren’t nearly so inestimable, nor nearly so dark.

It was the simplest difference—being alone, and being with someone else. The notion shouldn’t have caught his attention for even a moment, but Feynriel found himself dwelling on it all the same.

They left the library side by side, Connor lifting his fingers in a crooked salute to one of his master’s acquaintances, a woman with raven feathers pinned in her sleek hair and cheeks as flushed as a polished plum. She waved in return, then went back to her book, holding a pair of reading glasses carved from ornamental bone, her smallest finger curved like a true aristocrat.

Feynriel felt exhausted by the prospect of being expected to keep up with all of his master’s friends and enemies, his allies and associates and acquaintances, and the people he preferred to buy incense from, whose scents traveled farther than the smoke they became.

That was his life, Feynriel’s master often said, and he was training an apprentice into manhood, not mimicry or mirror-images.

‘Magister Decima,’ Connor confided, as they made their way together down the stone steps. ‘She’s got the most enormous… _appetite_ you’ve ever seen.’

‘So witty,’ Feynriel said, knowing he wouldn’t be expected to laugh.

The sun was setting when they took the long way home, Connor suddenly preferring the coastal roads to the crushing throngs of the market at mealtime. The tide was in, leaving only a narrow strip of white sand between the ocean and the city streets, rhythmic waves crashing against the shore and receding bit by bit with the pull of the moon. Already, a handful of early stars were winking in the still-bright sky, and the yellowing thumbnail of a harvest moon was visible in the distance, hanging over the Imperial Road where it stretched farther south before curving east to Perivantium.

‘Windy,’ Connor said, lifting a hand to fasten the buttons he’d left undone around his throat.

‘It’ll die down once we’re in the city,’ Feynriel replied.

The next step he took came too close, and their hands brushed, cool skin against Connor’s unexpected warmth.

If Feynriel lifted his nose to the winds, he could smell spiced meats and roasting vegetables, the sweet scent of candied fruits being sold at half-price now that the day was almost out, and they’d be discarded for fresher fare in the morning. Connor’s stomach gave another resilient growl, and Feynriel slid him a questioning look, wondering why they’d skipped out on the stalls when it was clear he wasn’t looking to wait until dinner.

‘Do you think Hawke’s fought all the sea monsters yet?’ Connor asked, studiously ignoring the meaning in Feynriel’s eyes. ‘I’d hate to think there’s _nothing_ to look forward to for the rest of the summer.’

‘Probably,’ Feynriel said. ‘He’s very efficient.’

‘Seems like it,’ Connor said, and fell quiet after that.

They stopped by a lone fisherman’s hut, where Feynriel doled out twenty-five coppers to buy a basket of crab’s legs, with half a lemon to squeeze over them. He handed his bounty over to Connor, who took it in wordless gratitude.

The patterned paper crinkled underneath his hands, and where their fingers brushed together.

Connor didn’t want to eat and walk at the same time. It made his stomach hurt, he explained, before he felt the need to bend over to illustrate pain. Feynriel accepted sitting in the dry, white sand while Connor snacked, more sand on his toes and lemon juice on his fingers.

Feynriel’s hands were still dry. He heard and saw the water at the same time, and though the Fade was nothing at all like a bottomless ocean, it did have comparable moments: the swell and crash of sound and smell and sight in confluence; the absence of color; the rip-tides that hid in deep pockets, treachery after treachery.

‘Do crabs have marrow?’ Connor cracked one of the shells, sucking the meat free from within, something so fresh and so raw that it would have been awful without the wind blowing and the open air and all the rhythm of the tide to remind Feynriel most things were this visceral, or most things should be.

There were no tastes in the Fade, save for the ones he heard. There was no flush of pale cheeks or pale crab-meat, either, or the splatter of lemon juice when Connor squeezed the rind.

‘They don’t even have bones,’ Feynriel replied.

‘Of course.’ Connor licked his thumb while surveying the shoreline, almost as though he expected a sudden army of crabs to avenge their fallen brethren in the basket. ‘Everything’s all inside-out with them.’

‘Maybe we’re the ones who are inside out,’ Feynriel said. When Connor looked his way, Feynriel shrugged, one-shouldered not because it was popular to do so but because one arm was supporting all his weight, fingers splayed in the sand. ‘Let me guess: you knew I’d say that.’

‘You _can_ be predictable,’ Connor told him.

Feynriel couldn’t—he wanted to say that, or make Connor more precise with his words, but Connor squinted and rubbed at his eye, which meant he’d probably gotten lemon juice in it, and there was something about the action that almost apologized for his inaccuracy, something he’d said even when he knew it wasn’t true, and it wasn’t right to say it.

‘No,’ Connor added. ‘It’s not predictable to help _the_ Champion of Kirkwall with his…special friend. In the Fade, no less. Probably not a good idea, but that’s never stopped either of us before, has it?’

‘How did you know?’ Feynriel asked.

Connor shrugged, also one-shouldered. ‘A lucky guess.’

‘It’s like Hawke said.’ Feynriel had to lean forward, trawling his fingers through the sand as he went, little furrows left behind that the wind would soon cover, that the sand wouldn’t mind. ‘If you stop, it’s so much harder to start again.’

‘Are you going to start dressing like Hawke now, too?’ Connor asked. ‘Because I can tell you right now, you’d look right _stupid_ with all that fur.’

Feynriel’s elbows straightened, stretching his back so long and tight that he could feel his muscles pulled from the base of his spine to the sore spot between his shoulder-blades. ‘What _is_ it with you and my clothes, anyway?’

‘I’d rather see you out of them, that’s all,’ Connor said.

Feynriel blinked. Connor sucked the juice off his fingers. His eyes were bright and there was a challenge in them, the same as when Feynriel looked over in the middle of a lesson, one more note flung at his head, balled up paper caught in his braid when it started to grow longer.

‘We’re all…’ Feynriel began, before the words tangled like his hair, and slipped free, and blew away. Order out of chaos, chaos out of order—and words to make sense of dreaming, in even a _somniari’s_ distracted mind. ‘…naked in the Fade, anyway, it’s just—what are you _talking_ about?’

‘I always thought,’ Connor continued, ‘that we’d…be sitting somewhere nice, out in a garden, sneaking away from one of the parties you hate, and for _once_ all the impressive things I do would actually _mean_ something. But you never get drunk, not properly, not even tipsy, certainly not friendly—and it’s _probably_ an elvhen thing, or half-elvhen, or just…you. It’s always _you_. I have _all_ the luck, don’t I?’

Connor licked the corner of his mouth. There was no beard there to obscure the lines of tension, or the quick, tight, nervous smile.

‘You could just unbutton _one_ button when it’s warm, that’s all,’ Connor said, swallowing tight against his collar, as tight as Feynriel’s was. ‘You haven’t even noticed— I’ve been trying for _months_ , and now I’m going to taste like _bloody crab_ and not, I don’t know, spiced wine, fresh fruits, _agreggio_ —’

Their shoulders didn’t bump. They’d bumped enough already, in the library whenever Connor turned a page, or whenever Feynriel did the same, and on the path they’d taken, the long way home instead of the more obvious, which was—in this case—the more direct.

Feynriel hadn’t thought about it, but if he had, he might have seen it in the Fade—their place, their closest claim to privacy, if only because they were so much more careful there. If only because they had to be.

But that wasn’t right, because there were no tastes in the Fade. It couldn’t be there, and it hadn’t been, and it wasn’t now.

Feynriel took the front of Connor’s collar where the ivory buttons were half-white and half-brown, and their noses banged together before their mouths actually met.

It was just a quick thing, too young for how old they were, for all the other things they’d done and conquered and simply seen.

‘So you do have _some_ mercy after all,’ Connor said when it was over. He wiped his hands on the front of his robes quickly, touching Feynriel’s face with nothing more than his fingertips; his fingers were gritty, smelling the same as his mouth tasted. ‘Just—putting me out of my misery, is that it? The same way other people kill a dying man?’

‘Shut up,’ Feynriel replied. It was Connor’s line. There was sand on his face and they hadn’t done it right, and Connor’s eyes closed when they tried it again, lips parting, everything a little more this time—not to mention a little more fishy.

Connor slipped forward, knees in the white sand, to cup his palms around Feynriel’s face, tilting him down for a better angle. It was foolish, cold, the wind tugging at Feynriel’s hair and leeching a salty chill through the thin fabric of his robes. Connor did taste like crab, but he tasted like himself beneath it, which was no taste at all save for the same tastes in Feynriel’s mouth already—and when his tongue slipped past Feynriel’s lips, it was accompanied by a heat to follow the chills, one that shivered down the length of Feynriel’s spine. He twiddled the buttons at Connor’s throat, turning their rough shape over between finger and thumb, tugging the loops of thread that held them in place, a restless gesture that meant he should have put his hands to good or better use.

But there were no lessons for kissing, no preparations to be made for passing into a lover’s embrace the same way Feynriel passed into the Fade.

Connor’s hands were strong, and he was getting sand down the back of Feynriel’s robes, underneath his high collar. That was uncomfortable; it also had to be enough.

It was Connor who broke this kiss first, not because he wanted to, but because Feynriel’s pulse was pounding, the demands of his lungs proving a match for the demands of his heart. There was no doubt Connor could hear it thumping; Feynriel was sure they’d hear it all the way in Minrathous, where it might yet be mistaken for a gladiator’s march, or the slap of a slave’s oars pulling their magister’s barge into harbor. Their breath mixed in the air between their mouths, but Feynriel could hear nothing but his pulse and no one else’s, while Connor’s thumbs eased up and down along the line of Feynriel’s jaw—stroking his face the same way he soothed an ill-tempered Orlesian warhorse.

The comparison wasn’t flattering.

Still, looking into Connor’s dark eyes, bright with reflected sealight, bumping the tips of their cold noses together, Feynriel realized that he could allow it.

He didn’t spare much thought for what they must have looked like—two shadowed bodies locked together on the coast in a desperate clinch, young and more than the least bit awkward, or the least bit foolish. If they’d been seen then that was that, and it no longer mattered by whom, or whether it would be the topic of choice at Magister Decima’s next gala.

Feynriel’s master never troubled himself over what was popular, what spread like wildfire instead of the slow and steady burn, and Feynriel was coming to realize, in his own way, that he felt the same.

Flames were too quick. Fever was sweeter.

Connor’s left hand slipped from his jaw, reaching to smooth Feynriel’s hair back from his brow where the wind had helped to tug it loose, where it had caught against his mouth and beneath his nose and stood between them, getting in the way.

‘Your hair is ridiculous,’ he whispered, voice nearly lost to the strong breeze. ‘Not just getting ridiculous—it’s there already. What’s the point in having it long if you can’t even keep it tied back? Is it _just_ to look impressive in the Fade winds, or is it to drive me mad?’

‘You like it,’ Feynriel said, though his words were as uncertain as his first narrow steps into the Fade.

‘I can’t keep my hands off it,’ Connor said, ‘ _actually._ In case you hadn’t noticed. And…there’s a difference. But proper hair stays where you put it, and if yours did, I wouldn’t want to touch it all the time.’

Feynriel still felt Connor’s fingers at his ear, that sharp and indecisive point of twisted cartilage he’d resented so much, and for so long. ‘You’re ridiculous.’

‘You can’t call me ridiculous,’ Connor said. ‘Because I just called _you_ ridiculous. I said it first.’

‘Your _beard_ is ridiculous, then,’ Feynriel told him. ‘It isn’t _even_ a beard at all.’

Connor snorted, right up against the corner of Feynriel’s mouth. ‘You’re almost sweeter than honeyed dates, Feynriel—has anyone ever told you that?’

No one ever had.

Feynriel allowed their foreheads to bump together, Connor’s thin braid trailing loose near his temple. He may have been second to arrive in Tevinter, but his legs were longer than Connor’s, and he was able to map the lay of the land that much more swiftly. Already, Feynriel could feel his breathing turn steady, long years of meditation taking hold of his body whenever it threatened to fail him. What should perhaps have come as a shock felt like nothing more than an extension of himself, a simple piece in one of the teak wood puzzles his master collected, fitting the polished joints together until they formed a lockbox.

When Feynriel let his hand drift to hold Connor’s, their fingers twined one through each, and held tight. Connor made as if to stand, then pulled Feynriel with him, leaning closer than Hawke—until he noticed the sand littering his second-best pair of robes.

‘White on white.’ Connor pulled away to brush his knees clean; when he did the same for Feynriel, it made the delicate silks shift over bare skin, with so little between them. ‘It could be worse, I suppose.’

Feynriel folded his arms, hands pressed against the inner crook of his elbows, which kept them steady, along with the rest of him. ‘Fighting sea monsters, for example, leaves all sorts of stains,’ he replied.

‘ _And_ it’s nowhere near as romantic.’ Connor threw Feynriel a heady look that wasn’t new—it was the same frustrating face he wore more than half the time these days, only now it meant something that made Feynriel want to sit down again.

‘They write poetry about epic battles,’ he said with a sniff. He could still feel the warmth of their kiss clinging to his skin, mouth pressed into a tight line. ‘I know Ferelden doesn’t care much for that sort of thing, but you’d think the _Orlesian_ in you might have a little more feeling.’

‘I don’t know how elves can be as dramatic as they are while remaining so… _heartless_.’ Connor nudged the basket with his bare toes, tipping it over into the sand, all the empty, cracked shells spilling out. In the dusk, the paper was nearly colorless, just shadow patterned against more shadow. ‘You know, when I end up with a beard like Hawke’s, you’re going to be sorry you ever encouraged me.’

‘But I’m not encouraging you,’ Feynriel said. ‘I’ve _never_ , in fact.’

Connor touched him at the side, where he always toyed with the slim straps and sashes that comprised Feynriel’s regular wardrobe. A tug here or a yank there, something to catch Feynriel’s attention, actions Feynriel shrugged off like the buzzing of a house fly—familiar enough that he almost missed it when it was gone, the distractions he’d come to think of as customary.

Now, Connor’s fingers splayed over the swath of green, the same way he touched a glossy leaf, or a canopy of foliage hanging low above their heads in a midnight garden. His thumb was warm, each fingertip round spots of pure heat, and Feynriel didn’t just feel it there where they touched, but everywhere, wrapped around him like lengths of cording and brocade, but especially knotted in the center of his belly. It felt the same as a braid with a lump in it.

It wasn’t a spell. They’d been trained so long and so well to predict and anticipate and guard against those that Feynriel knew he would have hated it more than he did if this had anything at all to do with magic, the Fade, fevers or dreaming. But it wasn’t comparable. It wasn’t anything, Connor just short enough that Feynriel knew he was currently wishing to be taller, and also that it didn’t matter, and also that it never would.

‘I suppose I must be more Fereldan than Orlesian, then,’ Connor said. ‘We’re as stubborn as dogs—or didn’t you hear?’

*

Marnus Pell hadn’t been turned on its head by the time they arrived for a late supper, lanterns lit along the walkway of Feynriel’s master’s summer pavilion. Connor kept snatching glances that Feynriel allowed him to steal without comment, which wouldn’t help him in the long run, and their timing was off as always, footfalls uneven on the bleached sandstone in the atrium.

Hawke was with Anders in the dining room, waiting for them; he welcomed them back by clearing his throat and winking, with an obvious second meaning that Feynriel found just as horrifying as offers from large demons.

For once, it was capable of horrifying Connor equally, twin spots of color on his cheeks, splotchy and unhandsome and almost endearing. It made everything match, the color of his hair and the color of his eyes and the color of his almost-beard, the scratchy feel of which Feynriel remembered on his chin and around his lips—not pleasant, but not unappreciated.

‘You’ve got a bit of a burn there, Connor,’ Hawke said. ‘Out in the sun too long, is that it?’

‘How were the smugglers, Champion?’ Connor replied.

They seemed as though they were near to tussling, and that would have a poor outcome—with Hawke certain to win—while Feynriel wondered which of them he’d been jealous of all along, and whether that jealousy’s nature and angles had been different from the ones he’d imagined were appropriate.

Feynriel did his best to look away from them—challenging each other to a grape eating contest—and toward something else, such as the shadow in the room: the one that fell over Hawke in dreaming, but retreated to a distant corner during his waking hours. Anders, sitting on one of the couches, with his hands folded over his knees, was picking at a cracked nail, trying to tug it free to no avail.

Dreams had made Feynriel too susceptible to understanding. When that understanding threatened to overwhelm him, he’d fallen ill, and he had—despite everything, despite how little assistance she would have given—wanted his mother, the touch of her hand cool against his brow.

His hair fell free again, loose, across the same warm stretch of skin, getting in his eyes. He brushed it back, but it wasn’t the same as someone else noticing and doing it for him.

‘They’re going to choke on those grapes,’ Anders said, as Feynriel sat at his side. ‘It’s a good thing I’m a healer, but…you can’t cure stupidity.’

They could waste time on small-talk, or they could start opening doors.

‘What is it you remember?’ Feynriel asked.

Anders’s shoulders twitched beneath his feathers, a dusty rustle. ‘Not as much as I should, apparently,’ he replied.

Hawke’s laughter interrupted them, followed by Connor’s, followed by the scrape of the long table as someone fell against it. They were throwing grapes now, tossing them high in the air and trying to catch them in their mouths; Feynriel glanced up at the same time Anders did, and Anders sighed. ‘If you think all _this_ is bad, just consider yourself lucky there aren’t any mabari around. No one ever wins when they challenge a _mabari_ to an eating contest—although that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t try.’

‘What is it you forget?’ Feynriel asked.

Anders licked his lips, and finally, the hangnail tore free, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Not everything. Hawke thinks it matters, you see, but it doesn’t matter. In a few years, I’ll _probably_ be dead. And I don’t just mean that in the cheerful way. There’s…something else. My Calling. We can come as far as Rivain or Tevinter or even Seheron, but there isn’t any way to outrun _that_.’

Feynriel’s eyes unfocused. He saw colors and bright lights in the dining room, flickering, gleaming in the lamps as always, but it was even more painstaking to order them all than it was to find meaning through the lines on a page.

There was so much of it all at once, every sense and sensation, that he realized the Fade was a retreat more than anything else—a way to compare, a way to contrast, a way to find logic in those moments that happened beyond its reaches, logic that appeared only when placed against a more obvious chaos.

‘He wants you to cure me,’ Anders continued. He sounded tired in a way Feynriel had never known, not even chased out of sleep and dream-walking like a thaig ghost through daylight hours. Still, Anders was smiling, as fond as he was sad. ‘I only wish you could. But like I said…there’s no cure for stupidity. Not even the finest healer knows how to fix _that_.’

‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ Feynriel said.

‘Hmm.’ Anders leaned forward to stretch out his back. It didn’t pop the way Hawke’s bad knee did, but he frowned nonetheless, a pale glow of healing magic sparking at his fingers as he reached around to soothe the quieter ache. ‘You’re too kind.’

‘No,’ Feynriel said, remembering the sight of his reflection in Connor’s eyes. ‘I’m really not.’

‘Then maybe you just don’t know me well enough yet,’ Anders said. He straightened and rubbed his hands together, extinguishing the pale white light between the press of his palms. When he caught Feynriel watching him, he managed another smile, tight and swift and humorless. ‘You’ve no idea what a _relief_ it is to finally be able to do that without looking over my shoulder for templars. The Imperium is the last bastion of civilized living in all of Thedas. …Except for all the slaves, of course. …And the blood magic.’

‘Dueling in the streets,’ Feynriel added.

‘Ferocious, gladiatorial combat.’ Anders paused to take something from a proffered plate, and Feynriel realized it was a fig, the same fruit he’d turned down the night before. ‘At least the food’s good, though. When you can remember to eat it.’

‘It all has to balance out somewhere,’ Feynriel said, co-opting a Tevinter proverb for his own purposes.

It was the meaning that mattered in the end, not the shape of the words.

‘True enough,’ Anders agreed, tearing through the fig’s soft skin with his teeth. He paused, and a clatter of dinnerware nearby drew both their attention: Hawke was framed by the furniture, choking on a grape while Connor thumped him soundly on the back. ‘No—you _are_ right. There _is_ a balance to things, Feynriel. All things. Maybe that’s more difficult for you to understand, living here as long as you have. Or maybe it’s simpler for you than anyone else because of what you are, and the life you’ve lead—I can’t know, and I wouldn’t presume to say.’ When Hawke finally righted himself, Anders’s smile grew more certain, though he shook his head soon after that. It might have been a trick of the light, but Feynriel glimpsed a touch of color in his cheeks, beneath the hollows, above the stubble, before his focus shifted and brightened, fever-hot. ‘But I made my choices, all of them, a long time ago. Hawke even made his. And neither of us can change the consequences. Not now. Not after everything. It would be… Well, _unfair_ doesn’t begin to cover it. Unjust, maybe.’

The words lingered, like smoke above the incense, what imbued the incense with power. Smoke was what filled the room, but you couldn’t hold it or light it on fire or chase it when it curled away.

Feynriel turned down the figs in favor of watching the slaves bring more food to the table, the final preparations for a late dinner nearly complete. He and Connor had scarcely made it back in time, and although Feynriel knew he’d have nothing to explain to his absent master—he was no longer a child, and no longer held to the standards of one—he still felt his pulse quicken in his wrists, beneath the fall of his long sleeves, to think of trailing in late with sand on his knees.

It was a trespass that had nothing to do with magic, though magic was always about trespasses. Mages could perform feats other men could only dream of—and so magic was always unfair, necessarily unjust, perhaps beautifully so.

‘I think we’d better have some supper,’ Feynriel said, hands covering his knees, wrinkling the delicate weave of his robes under his touch. Some sand yet remained there and he brushed it off, white grains caught in the cracks worn across the tops of his boots. ‘We’ll all think better on a full stomach.’

He pretended to be immune to the sharp look Anders gave him after that, clear eyes no longer dreamy or hazed with the same sleepy distance. When Feynriel tipped his head in Anders’s direction, there was the same half-smile curving his mouth, an expression of idle resignation that creased the skin at the corners of both eyes.

‘He chose you well, didn’t he?’ Anders reached for his staff before he stood, an old habit that had yet to be broken, even in the relative safety of the Imperium. Still, to call the place safe was akin to calling a traveling circus the same, two tigers locked in the same cage, pacing a common length of narrow space. It all depended on who was safe from whom, and what instincts the scent of blood would conjure. ‘I’d call you stubborn as a mabari, but I don’t think it would mean the same thing.’

‘Are _all_ Fereldans so infatuated with their own idioms?’ Feynriel asked, pulling out a chair for his guest, before any of the slaves could do it.

‘Only the ones who come from the Anderfels,’ Anders replied, and sat down lightly.

Hawke and Connor had made themselves comfortable on the other side, an empty, earthenware bowl between them, while Feynriel’s master remained nowhere to be seen. There were no telltale hints to betray his presence in the house, no incense-smoke billowing out the windows, nor a litter of his favorite dishes—smoked skewers of shaved ham and cooked apple, dried mushrooms and clear broth—being borne up to the master bedroom. It may well have been one more in a series of tests—to see if Feynriel could handle becoming master of ceremonies for the night, as though there was no one else to whom the pavilion belonged, no one else for whom this task and this company were better suited.

Either that, or he’d made other, unbreakable plans. Perhaps there was a dulcimer concerto being performed that hour, or one of the longer, historical plays Feynriel favored, during which Connor always managed to drift off.

Sleep wasn’t always easy for him. Feynriel didn’t resent his opportunities, just his snoring.

‘You two look _cozy_ over there,’ Hawke said, resting his chin in one hand. ‘What were you flirting about, in your private little corner?’

‘Flirting?’ Anders stared down at his empty plate. ‘At least we weren’t feeding each other grapes.’

‘It’s not as though we went so far as to peel them for each other,’ Hawke said. ‘ _That’s_ what you have to look out for. And we were more…throwing them than anything else.’

‘Fereldan mating rituals,’ Anders replied. ‘I never pretended to understand them.’

‘Eugh,’ Connor said.

‘Now, hang on,’ Hawke began. ‘Peeled grapes or no, _eugh_ can hurt a man, if you aren’t careful.’

Connor leaned back, no longer hungry; only Feynriel knew the secret why, what he’d eaten, how he’d satisfied himself beforehand. ‘You’re not my type,’ he said.

There was laughter. There were guests. There was a purpose, too, that Feynriel caught in hints and glimmers and slips and slides, like a curtain blowing in and out of an open window by the sea, or hair being tugged loose from a simple braid by that same breeze. It wasn’t necessarily unraveling; he just had to put it back together, or at least find the pieces. He knew it when Hawke’s attention strayed to Anders and when Anders’s attention strayed from the room; there was the hum of the Fade even while their eyes were open, that bright light in Anders’s eyes flashing like veins of raw lyrium.

Feynriel reached for a glass of water and sipped, something cool and fresh and clean in his mouth and against his tongue. Connor didn’t stare at him across the table, but he did bump his foot against Feynriel’s under it, something he used to do all the time, and blame on Feynriel’s long legs after.

Now, Feynriel could see him reaching, stretching. He was doing it on purpose.

Feynriel nudged him back.

‘Anders,’ Hawke said. ‘This is where you say, _But Hawke’s_ my _type,_ and everyone in the room rolls their eyes a bit, except for me, because I’m too busy batting my lashes.’

‘Hm,’ Anders replied.

Hawke’s mouth tightened, the same as Feynriel’s fingers tightened around the stem of his glass.

‘Feynriel?’ Connor asked.

‘Tonight,’ Feynriel said. ‘We’ll begin tonight. I’m ready to start.’

‘Start? Now hang _on_.’ Connor nearly stood, then thought better of it, then changed his mind a second time. He came around the table, despite everyone watching him, despite what it meant or what they’d think it mean; there was something reminiscent of Hawke in that carelessness, and also something otherwise specific. No one else would have done it, not for Feynriel, and he didn’t move over when Connor sat again at his side, leaning too close. ‘You’re going to do something dangerous, aren’t you?’

‘Very,’ Hawke said. ‘At least…probably very. I’m a bad influence. A terrible one. Everyone always says so.’

‘I didn’t ask you,’ Connor told him. ‘No offense.’

Hawke shrugged. ‘None taken. But if you’d called me a blasted turnip, it _might_ be a different story.’

Feynriel realized it was his turn to speak, as though anything he felt could have been translated, or should have been, so obvious over their unfinished supper. He supposed he might have waited until dessert to mention it, instead of distracting them all from eating.

A clear mind, an open heart—and a full stomach. Feynriel served himself some bread, then ate it. It was real, still warm, with a hard crust and dipping oils nearby, and it tasted delicious.

‘…Fine,’ Connor said at last, with a deep sigh. ‘No worries, then. But I did the research, too. I might as well go with you.’

‘I never imagined you wouldn’t,’ Feynriel replied.

 **END**


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